GRECIAN AFFAIRS AFTER THE EXPULSION OF THE PEISISTRATIDS. —
REVOLUTION OF KLEISTHENES AND ESTABLISHMENT OF DEMOCRACY AT ATHENS.
With Hippias disappeared the mercenary Thracian garrison, upon which
he and his father before him had leaned for defence as well as for
enforcement of authority; and Kleomenês with his Lacedæmonian forces
retired also, after staying only long enough to establish a personal
friendship, productive subsequently of important consequences,
between the Spartan king and the Athenian Isagoras. The Athenians
were thus left to themselves, without any foreign interference to
constrain them in their political arrangements.
It has been mentioned in the preceding chapter, that the
Peisistratids had for the most part respected the forms of the
Solonian constitution: the nine archons, and the probouleutic or
preconsidering Senate of Four Hundred (both annually changed),
still continued to subsist, together with occasional meetings
of the people,—or rather of such portion of the people as was
comprised in the gentes, phratries, and four Ionic tribes. The
timocratic classification of Solon (or quadruple scale of income and
admeasurement of political franchises according to it) also continued
to subsist,—but all within the tether and subservient to the
purposes of the ruling family, who always kept one of their number
as real master, among the chief administrators, and always retained
possession of the acropolis as well as of the mercenary force.
That overawing pressure being now removed by the expulsion of
Hippias, the enslaved forms became at once endued with freedom and
reality. There appeared again, what Attica had not known for thirty
years, declared political parties, and pronounced opposition between
two men as leaders,—on one side, Isagoras son of Tisander, a person
of illustrious descent,—on the other, Kleisthenês the Alkmæônid,
not less illustrious, and possessing at this moment a claim on the
gratitude of his countrymen as the most persevering as well as the
most effective foe of the dethroned despots. In what manner such
opposition was carried on we are not told. It would seem to have been
not altogether pacific; but at any rate, Kleisthenês had the worst
of it, and in consequence of this defeat, says the historian, “he
took into partnership the people, who had been before excluded from
everything.”[243] His partnership with the people gave birth to the
Athenian democracy: it was a real and important revolution.
[243] Herodot. v, 66-69 ἑσσούμενος δὲ ὁ Κλεισθένης τὸν δῆμον
προσεταιρίζεται—ὡς γὰρ δὴ τὸν Ἀθηναίων δῆμον, πρότερον ἀπωσμένον
πάντων, τότε πρὸς τὴν ἑωϋτοῦ μοίρην προσεθήκατο, etc.
The political franchise, or the character of an Athenian citizen,
both before and since Solon, had been confined to the primitive
four Ionic tribes, each of which was an aggregate of so many close
corporations or quasi-families,—the gentes and the phratries. None
of the residents in Attica, therefore, except those included in
some gens or phratry, had any part in the political franchise. Such
non-privileged residents were probably at all times numerous, and
became more and more so by means of fresh settlers: moreover, they
tended most to multiply in Athens and Peiræus, where emigrants would
commonly establish themselves. Kleisthenês broke down the existing
wall of privilege, and imparted the political franchise to the
excluded mass. But this could not be done by enrolling them in new
gentes or phratries, created in addition to the old; for the gentile
tie was founded upon old faith and feeling, which, in the existing
state of the Greek mind, could not be suddenly conjured up as a
bond of union for comparative strangers: it could only be done by
disconnecting the franchise altogether from the Ionic tribes as well
as from the gentes which constituted them, and by redistributing the
population into new tribes with a character and purpose exclusively
political. Accordingly, Kleisthenês abolished the four Ionic tribes,
and created in their place ten new tribes founded upon a different
principle, independent of the gentes and phratries. Each of his
new tribes comprised a certain number of demes or cantons, with
the enrolled proprietors and residents in each of them. The demes
taken altogether included the entire surface of Attica, so that
the Kleisthenean constitution admitted to the political franchise
all the free native Athenians; and not merely these, but also many
Metics, and even some of the superior order of slaves.[244] Putting
out of sight the general body of slaves, and regarding only the
free inhabitants, it was in point of fact a scheme approaching to
universal suffrage, both political and judicial.
[244] Aristot. Polit. iii, 1, 10; vi, 2, 11. Κλεισθένης,—πολλοῖς
ἐφυλέτευσε ξένους καὶ δούλους μετοίκους.
Several able critics, and Dr. Thirlwall among the number,
consider this passage as affording no sense, and assume some
conjectural emendation to be indispensable; though there is no
particular emendation which suggests itself as preëminently
plausible. Under these circumstances, I rather prefer to make
the best of the words as they stand; which, though unusual,
seem to me not absolutely inadmissible. The expression ξένος
μέτοικος (which is a perfectly good one, as we find in Aristoph.
Equit. 347,—εἴπου δικιδίον εἶπας εὖ κατὰ ξένου μετοίκου) may
be considered as the correlative to δούλους μετοίκους,—the
last word being construed both with δούλους and with ξένους. I
apprehend that there always must have been in Attica a certain
number of intelligent slaves living apart from their masters
(χωρὶς οἰκοῦντες), in a state between slavery and freedom,
working partly on condition of a fixed payment to him, partly for
themselves, and perhaps continuing to pass nominally as slaves
after they had bought their liberty by instalments. Such men
would be δοῦλοι μέτοικοι: indeed, there are cases in which δοῦλοι
signifies _freedmen_ (Meier, De Gentilitate Atticâ, p. 6): they
must have been industrious and pushing men, valuable partisans to
a political revolution. See K. F. Hermann, Lehrbuch der Griech.
Staats Alterth. ch. 111, not. 15.
The slight and cursory manner in which Herodotus announces this
memorable revolution tends to make us overlook its real importance.
He dwells chiefly on the alteration in the number and names of the
tribes: Kleisthenês, he says, despised the Ionians so much, that he
would not tolerate the continuance in Attica of the four tribes which
prevailed in the Ionic cities,[245] deriving their names from the
four sons of Ion,—just as his grandfather, the Sikyonian Kleisthenês,
hating the Dorians, had degraded and nicknamed the three Dorian
tribes at Sikyôn. Such is the representation of Herodotus, who seems
himself to have entertained some contempt for the Ionians,[246]
and therefore to have suspected a similar feeling where it had no
real existence. But the scope of Kleisthenês was something far more
extensive: he abolished the four ancient tribes, not because they
were Ionic, but because they had become incommensurate with the
existing condition of the Attic people, and because such abolition
procured both for himself and for his political scheme new as well
as hearty allies. And indeed, if we study the circumstances of the
case, we shall see very obvious reasons to suggest the proceeding.
For more than thirty years—an entire generation—the old constitution
had been a mere empty formality, working only in subservience to the
reigning dynasty, and stripped of all real controlling power. We may
be very sure, therefore, that both the Senate of Four Hundred and
the popular assembly, divested of that free speech which imparted
to them not only all their value but all their charm, had come to
be of little public estimation, and were probably attended only
by a few partisans; and thus the difference between qualified
citizens and men not so qualified,—between members of the four old
tribes, and men not members,—became during this period practically
effaced. This, in fact, was the only species of good which a Grecian
despotism ever seems to have done: it confounded the privileged and
the non-privileged under one coercive authority common to both, so
that the distinction between the two was not easy to revive when the
despotism passed away. As soon as Hippias was expelled, the senate
and the public assembly regained their efficiency. But had they been
continued on the old footing, including none except members of the
four tribes, these tribes would have been reinvested with a privilege
which in reality they had so long lost, that its revival would have
seemed an odious novelty, and the remaining population would probably
not have submitted to it. If, in addition, we consider the political
excitement of the moment,—the restoration of one body of men from
exile, and the departure of another body into exile,—the outpouring
of long-suppressed hatred, partly against these very forms, by
the corruption of which the despot had reigned,—we shall see that
prudence as well as patriotism dictated the adoption of an enlarged
scheme of government. Kleisthenês had learned some wisdom during
his long exile; and as he probably continued, for some time after
the introduction of his new constitution, to be the chief adviser
of his countrymen, we may consider their extraordinary success as a
testimony to his prudence and skill not less than to their courage
and unanimity.
[245] Herodot. v, 69. Κλεισθένης,—ὑπεριδὼν Ἴωνας, ἵνα μὴ σφισι αἱ
αὐταὶ ἔωσι φυλαὶ καὶ Ἴωσι.
[246] Such a disposition seems evident in Herodot. i, 143.
Nor does it seem unreasonable to give him credit for a more generous
forward movement than what is implied in the literal account of
Herodotus. Instead of being forced against his will to purchase
popular support by proposing this new constitution, Kleisthenês may
have proposed it before, during the discussions which immediately
followed the retirement of Hippias; so that the rejection of it
formed the ground of quarrel—and no other ground is mentioned—between
him and Isagoras. The latter doubtless found sufficient support, in
the existing senate and public assembly, to prevent it from being
carried without an actual appeal to the people, and his opposition
to it is not difficult to understand. For, necessary as the change
had become, it was not the less a shock to ancient Attic ideas.
It radically altered the very idea of a tribe, which now became
an aggregation of demes, not of gentes,—of fellow-demots, not of
fellow-gentiles; and it thus broke up those associations, religious,
social, and political, between the whole and the parts of the old
system, which operated powerfully on the mind of every old-fashioned
Athenian. The patricians at Rome, who composed the gentes and
curiæ,—and the plebs, who had no part in these corporations,—formed
for a long time two separate and opposing fractions in the same
city, each with its own separate organization. It was only by slow
degrees that the plebs gained ground, and the political value of the
patrician gens was long maintained alongside of and apart from the
plebeian tribe. So too in the Italian and German cities of the Middle
Ages, the patrician families refused to part with their own separate
political identity, when the guilds grew up by the side of them; even
though forced to renounce a portion of their power, they continued
to be a separate fraternity, and would not submit to be regimented
anew, under an altered category and denomination, along with the
traders who had grown into wealth and importance.[247] But the reform
of Kleisthenês effected this change all at once, both as to the name
and as to the reality. In some cases, indeed, that which had been the
name of a gens was retained as the name of a deme, but even then the
old gentiles were ranked indiscriminately among the remaining demots;
and the Athenian people, politically considered, thus became one
homogeneous whole, distributed for convenience into parts, numerical,
local, and politically equal. It is, however, to be remembered, that
while the four Ionic tribes were abolished, the gentes and phratries
which composed them were left untouched, and continued to subsist
as family and religious associations, though carrying with them no
political privilege.
[247] In illustration of what is here stated, see the account of
the modifications of the constitution of Zurich, in Blüntschli,
Staats und Rechts Geschichte der Stadt Zurich, book iii. ch. 2,
p. 322; also, Kortüm, Entstehungs Geschichte der Freistädtischen
Bünde im Mittelalter, ch. 5, pp. 74-75.
The ten newly-created tribes, arranged in an established order of
precedence, were called,—Erechthêis, Ægêis, Pandiŏnis, Leontis,
Akamantis, Œnêis, Kekrŏpis, Hippothoöntis, Æantis, Antiochis; names
borrowed chiefly from the respected heroes of Attic legend.[248]
This number remained unaltered until the year 305 B. C., when it was
increased to twelve by the addition of two new tribes, Antigonias
and Demetrias, afterwards designated anew by the names of Ptolemais
and Attalis. The mere names of these last two, borrowed from living
kings, and not from legendary heroes, betray the change from
freedom to subservience at Athens. Each tribe comprised a certain
number of demes,—cantons, parishes, or townships,—in Attica. But
the total number of these demes is not distinctly ascertained; for
though we know that, in the time of Polemô (the third century B.
C.), it was one hundred and seventy-four, we cannot be sure that
it had always remained the same; and several critics construe the
words of Herodotus to imply that Kleisthenês at first recognized
exactly one hundred demes, distributed in equal proportion among his
ten tribes.[249] But such construction of the words is more than
doubtful, while the fact itself is improbable; partly because if the
change of number had been so considerable as the difference between
one hundred and one hundred and seventy-four, some positive evidence
of it would probably be found,—partly because Kleisthenês would,
indeed, have a motive to render the amount of citizen population
nearly equal, but no motive to render the number of demes equal,
in each of the ten tribes. It is well known how great is the force
of local habits, and how unalterable are parochial or cantonal
boundaries. In the absence of proof to the contrary, therefore, we
may reasonably suppose the number and circumscription of the demes,
as found or modified by Kleisthenês, to have subsisted afterwards
with little alteration, at least until the increase in the number of
the tribes.
[248] Respecting these Eponymous Heroes of the Ten Tribes,
and the legends connected with them, see chapter viii of the
Ἐπιτάφιος Λόγος, erroneously ascribed to Demosthenês.
[249] Herodot. v, 69. δέκα δὲ καὶ τοὺς δήμους κατένεμε ἐς τὰς
φυλάς.
Schömann contends that Kleisthenês established exactly one
hundred demes to the ten tribes (De Comitiis Atheniensium, Præf.
p. xv and p. 363, and Antiquitat. Jur. Pub. Græc. ch. xxii, p.
260), and K. F. Hermann (Lehrbuch der Griech. Staats Alt. ch.
111) thinks that this is what Herodotus meant to affirm, though
he does not believe the fact to have really stood so.
I incline, as the least difficulty in the case, to construe δέκα
with φυλὰς and not with δήμους, as Wachsmuth (i, 1, p. 271) and
Dieterich (De Clisthene, a treatise cited by K. F. Hermann, but
which I have not seen) construe it.
There is another point, however, which is at once more certain, and
more important to notice. The demes which Kleisthenês assigned to
each tribe were in no case all adjacent to each other; and therefore
the tribe, as a whole, did not correspond with any continuous portion
of the territory, nor could it have any peculiar local interest,
separate from the entire community. Such systematic avoidance of
the factions arising out of neighborhood will appear to have been
more especially necessary, when we recollect that the quarrels of
the Parali, the Diakrii, the Pediaki, during the preceding century,
had all been generated from local feud, though doubtless artfully
fomented by individual ambition. Moreover, it was only by this same
precaution that the local predominance of the city, and the formation
of a city-interest distinct from that of the country, was obviated;
which could hardly have failed to arise had the city by itself
constituted either one deme or one tribe. Kleisthenês distributed
the city (or found it already distributed) into several demes, and
those demes among several tribes; while Peiræus and Phalêrum, each
constituting a separate deme, were also assigned to different tribes;
so that there were no local advantages either to bestow predominance,
or to create a struggle for predominance, of one tribe over the
rest.[250] Each deme had its own local interests to watch over; but
the tribe was a mere aggregate of demes for political, military, and
religious purposes, with no separate hopes or fears, apart from the
whole state. Each tribe had a chapel, sacred rites and festivals,
and a common fund for such meetings, in honor of its eponymous hero,
administered by members of its own choice;[251] and the statues of
all the ten eponymous heroes, fraternal patrons of the democracy,
were planted in the most conspicuous part of the agora of Athens.
In the future working of the Athenian government, we shall trace no
symptom of disquieting local factions,—a capital amendment, compared
with the disputes of the preceding century, and traceable, in part,
to the absence of border-relations between demes of the same tribe.
[250] The deme _Melitê_ belonged to the tribe Kekropis;
_Kollytus_, to the tribe Ægêis; _Kydathenæon_, to the tribe
Pandionis; _Kerameis_ or _Kerameikus_, to the Akamantis;
_Skambônidæ_, to the Leontis.
All these five were demes within the city of Athens, and all
belonged to different tribes.
_Peiræus_ belonged to the Hippothoöntis; _Phalêrum_, to
the Æantis; _Xypetê_, to the Kekropis; _Thymætadæ_, to the
Hippothoöntis. These four demes, adjoining to each other,
formed a sort of quadruple local union, for festivals and other
purposes, among themselves; though three of them belonged to
different tribes.
See the list of the Attic demes, with a careful statement of
their localities in so far as ascertained, in Professor Ross,
Die Demen von Attika. Halle, 1846. The distribution of the
city-demes, and of Peiræus and Phalêrum, among different tribes,
appears to me a clear proof of the intention of the original
distributors. It shows that they wished from the beginning
to make the demes constituting each tribe discontinuous, and
that they desired to prevent both the growth of separate
tribe-interests and ascendency of one tribe over the rest. It
contradicts the belief of those who suppose that the tribe was
at first composed of continuous demes, and that the breach of
continuity arose from subsequent changes.
Of course there were many cases in which adjoining demes belonged
to the same tribe; but not one of the ten tribes was made up
altogether of adjoining demes.
[251] See Boeckh, Corp. Inscriptt. Nos. 85, 128, 213, etc.:
compare Demosthen. cont. Theokrin. c. 4. p. 1326 R.
The deme now became the primitive constituent element of the
commonwealth, both as to persons and as to property. It had its own
demarch, its register of enrolled citizens, its collective property,
its public meetings and religious ceremonies, its taxes levied and
administered by itself. The register of qualified citizens[252] was
kept by the demarch, and the inscription of new citizens took place
at the assembly of the demots, whose legitimate sons were enrolled
on attaining the age of eighteen, and their adopted sons at any time
when presented and sworn to by the adopting citizen. The citizenship
could only be granted by a public vote of the people, but wealthy
non-freemen were enabled sometimes to evade this law and purchase
admission upon the register of some poor deme, probably by means of
a fictitious adoption. At the meetings of the demots, the register
was called over, and it sometimes happened that some names were
expunged,—in which case the party thus disfranchised had an appeal to
the popular judicature.[253] So great was the local administrative
power, however, of these demes, that they are described as the
substitute,[254] under the Kleisthenean system, for the naukraries
under the Solonian and ante-Solonian. The trittyes and naukraries,
though nominally preserved, and the latter (as some affirm) augmented
in number from forty-eight to fifty, appear henceforward as of little
public importance.
[252] We may remark that this register was called by a special
name, the Lexiarchic register; while the primitive register of
phrators and gentiles always retained, even in the time of the
orators, its original name of the common register—Harpokration,
v. Κοινὸν γραμματεῖον καὶ ληξιαρχικόν.
[253] See Schömann, Antiq. Jur. P. Græc. ch. xxiv. The oration
of Demosthenês against Eubulidês is instructive about these
proceedings of the assembled demots: compare Harpokration, v.
Διαψήφισις, and Meier, De Bonis Damnatorum, ch. xii, p. 78, etc.
[254] Aristot. Fragment. de Republ., ed. Neumann.—Ἀθην. πολιτ.
Fr. 40, p. 88; Schol. ad Aristophan. Ran. 37; Harpokration, v.
Δήμαρχος—Ναυκραρικά; Photius, v. Ναυκραρία.
Kleisthenês preserved, but at the same time modified and expanded,
all the main features of Solon’s political constitution; the public
assembly, or ekklesia,—the preconsidering senate, composed of members
from all the tribes,—and the habit of annual election, as well as
annual responsibility of magistrates, by and to the ekklesia. The
full value must now have been felt of possessing such preëxisting
institutions to build upon, at a moment of perplexity and dissension.
But the Kleisthenean ekklesia acquired new strength, and almost a
new character, from the great increase of the number of citizens
qualified to attend it; while the annually-changed senate, instead
of being composed of four hundred members taken in equal proportion
from each of the old four tribes, was enlarged to five hundred,
taken equally from each of the new ten tribes. It now comes before
us, under the name of Senate of Five Hundred, as an active and
indispensable body throughout the whole Athenian democracy: and the
practice now seems to have begun (though the period of commencement
cannot be decisively proved), of determining the names of the
senators by lot. Both the senate thus constituted, and the public
assembly, were far more popular and vigorous than they had been under
the original arrangement of Solon.
The new constitution of the tribes, as it led to a change in the
annual senate, so it transformed, no less directly, the military
arrangements of the state, both as to soldiers and as to officers.
The citizens called upon to serve in arms were now marshalled
according to tribes,—each tribe having its own taxiarchs as officers
for the hoplites, and its own phylarch at the head of the horsemen.
Moreover, there were now created for the first time ten strategi, or
generals, one from each tribe; and two hipparchs, for the supreme
command of the horsemen. Under the prior Athenian constitution it
appears that the command of the military force had been vested in the
third archon, or polemarch, no strategi then existing; and even after
the latter had been created, under the Kleisthenean constitution,
the polemarch still retained a joint right of command along with
them,—as we are told at the battle of Marathon, where Kallimachus
the polemarch not only enjoyed an equal vote in the council of war
along with the ten strategi, but even occupied the post of honor on
the right wing.[255] The ten generals, annually changed, are thus
(like the ten tribes) a fruit of the Kleisthenean constitution, which
was at the same time powerfully strengthened and protected by such
remodelling of the military force. The functions of the generals
becoming more extensive as the democracy advanced, they seem to
have acquired gradually not merely the direction of military and
naval affairs, but also that of the foreign relations of the city
generally,—while the nine archons, including the polemarch, were by
degrees lowered down from that full executive and judicial competence
which they had once enjoyed, to the simple ministry of police and
preparatory justice. Encroached upon by the strategi on one side,
they were also restricted in efficiency by the rise of the popular
dikasteries or numerous jury-courts, on the other. We may be very
sure that these popular dikasteries had not been permitted to meet
or to act under the despotism of the Peisistratids, and that the
judicial business of the city must then have been conducted partly
by the Senate of Areopagus, partly by the archons; perhaps with a
nominal responsibility of the latter at the end of their year of
office to an acquiescent ekklesia. And if we even assume it to be
true, as some writers contend, that the habit of direct popular
judicature, over and above this annual trial of responsibility, had
been partially introduced by Solon, it must have been discontinued
during the long coercion exercised by the supervening dynasty. But
the outburst of popular spirit, which lent force to Kleisthenês,
doubtless carried the people into direct action as jurors in the
aggregate Heliæa, not less than as voters in the ekklesia,—and the
change was thus begun which contributed to degrade the archons from
their primitive character as judges, into the lower function of
preliminary examiners and presidents of a jury. Such convocation of
numerous juries, beginning first with the aggregate body of sworn
citizens above thirty years of age, and subsequently dividing them
into separate bodies or pannels, for trying particular causes, became
gradually more frequent and more systematized: until at length, in
the time of Periklês, it was made to carry a small pay, and stood out
as one of the most prominent features of Athenian life. We cannot
particularize the different steps whereby such final development was
attained, and the judicial competence of the archon cut down to the
mere power of inflicting a small fine; but the first steps of it are
found in the revolution of Kleisthenês, and it seems to have been
consummated by the reforms of Periklês. Of the function exercised by
the nine archons as well as by many other magistrates and official
persons at Athens, in convoking a dikastery, or jury-court, bringing
on causes for trial,—and presiding over the trial,—a function
constituting one of the marks of superior magistracy, and called the
Hegemony, or presidency of a dikastery,—I shall speak more at length
hereafter. At present, I wish merely to bring to view the increased
and increasing sphere of action on which the people entered at the
memorable turn of affairs now before us.
[255] Herodot. vi, 109-111.
The financial affairs of the city underwent at this epoch as complete
a change as the military: in fact, the appointment of magistrates
and officers by tens, one from each tribe, seems to have become the
ordinary practice. A board of ten, called Apodektæ, were invested
with the supreme management of the exchequer, dealing with the
contractors as to those portions of the revenue which were farmed,
receiving all the taxes from the collectors, and disbursing them
under competent authority. The first nomination of this board is
expressly ascribed to Kleisthenês,[256] as a substitute for certain
persons called Kôlakretæ, who had performed the same function
before, and who were now retained only for subordinate services.
The duties of the apodektæ were afterwards limited to receiving
the public income, and paying it over to the ten treasurers of
the goddess Athênê, by whom it was kept in the inner chamber of
the Parthenon, and disbursed as needed; but this more complicated
arrangement cannot be referred to Kleisthenês. From his time forward
too, the Senate of Five Hundred steps far beyond its original
duty of preparing matters for the discussion of the ekklesia: it
embraces, besides, a large circle of administrative and general
superintendence, which hardly admits of any definition. Its sittings
become constant, with the exception of special holidays, and the year
is distributed into ten portions called Prytanies,—the fifty senators
of each tribe taking by turns the duty of constant attendance
during one prytany, and receiving during that time the title of
The Prytanes: the order of precedence among the tribes in these
duties was annually determined by lot. In the ordinary Attic year
of twelve lunar months, or three hundred and fifty-four days, six
of the prytanies contained thirty-five days, four of them contained
thirty-six: in the intercalated years of thirteen months, the number
of days was thirty-eight and thirty-nine respectively. Moreover, a
farther subdivision of the prytany into five periods of seven days
each, and of the fifty tribe-senators into five bodies of ten each,
was recognized: each body of ten presided in the senate for one
period of seven days, drawing lots every day among their number for
a new chairman, called Epistatês, to whom during his day of office
were confided the keys of the acropolis and the treasury, together
with the city seal. The remaining senators, not belonging to the
prytanizing tribe, might of course attend if they chose; but the
attendance of nine among them, one from each of the remaining nine
tribes, was imperatively necessary to constitute a valid meeting, and
to insure a constant representation of the collective people.
[256] Harpokration, v. Ἀποδέκται.
During those later times known to us through the great orators,
the ekklesia, or formal assembly of the citizens, was convoked
four times regularly during each prytany, or oftener if necessity
required,—usually by the senate, though the stratêgi had also the
power of convoking it by their own authority. It was presided over by
the prytanes, and questions were put to the vote by their epistatês,
or chairman; but the nine representatives of the non-prytanizing
tribes were always present as a matter of course, and seem, indeed,
in the days of the orators, to have acquired to themselves the
direction of it, together with the right of putting questions for
the vote,[257]—setting aside wholly or partially the fifty prytanes.
When we carry our attention back, however, to the state of the
ekklesia, as first organized by Kleisthenês (I have already remarked
that expositors of the Athenian constitution are too apt to neglect
the distinction of times, and to suppose that what was the practice
between 400-330 B. C. had been always the practice), it will appear
probable that he provided one regular meeting in each prytany, and
no more; giving to the senate and the stratêgi power of convening
special meetings if needful, but establishing one ekklesia during
each prytany, or ten in the year, as a regular necessity of state.
How often the ancient ekklesia had been convoked during the interval
between Solon and Peisistratus, we cannot exactly say,—probably
but seldom during the year. But under the Peisistratids, its
convocation had dwindled down into an inoperative formality; and
the reëstablishment of it by Kleisthenês, not merely with plenary
determining powers, but also under full notice and preparation of
matters beforehand, together with the best securities for orderly
procedure, was in itself a revolution impressive to the mind of
every Athenian citizen. To render the ekklesia efficient, it was
indispensable that its meetings should be both frequent and free.
Men thus became trained to the duty both of speakers and hearers,
and each man, while he felt that he exercised his share of influence
on the decision, identified his own safety and happiness with the
vote of the majority, and became familiarized with the notion of
a sovereign authority which he neither could nor ought to resist.
This is an idea new to the Athenian bosom; and with it came the
feelings sanctifying free speech and equal law,—words which no
Athenian citizen ever afterwards heard unmoved: together with that
sentiment of the entire commonwealth as one and indivisible, which
always overruled, though it did not supplant, the local and cantonal
special ties. It is not too much to say that these patriotic and
ennobling impulses were a new product in the Athenian mind, to which
nothing analogous occurs even in the time of Solon. They were kindled
in part doubtless by the strong reaction against the Peisistratids,
but still more by the fact that the opposing leader, Kleisthenês,
turned that transitory feeling to the best possible account, and
gave to it a vigorous perpetuity, as well as a well-defined positive
object, by the popular elements conspicuous in his constitution. His
name makes less figure in history than we should expect, because
he passed for the mere renovator of Solon’s scheme of government
after it had been overthrown by Peisistratus. Probably he himself
professed this object, since it would facilitate the success of his
propositions: and if we confine ourselves to the letter of the case,
the fact is in a great measure true, since the annual senate and
the ekklesia are both Solonian,—but both of them under his reform
were clothed in totally new circumstances, and swelled into gigantic
proportions. How vigorous was the burst of Athenian enthusiasm,
altering instantaneously the position of Athens among the powers of
Greece, we shall hear presently from the lips of Herodotus, and shall
find still more unequivocally marked in the facts of his history.
[257] See the valuable treatise of Schömann, De Comitiis,
_passim_; also his Antiq. Jur. Publ. Gr. ch. xxxi; Harpokration,
v. Κυρία Ἐκκλησία; Pollux, viii, 95.
But it was not only the people formally installed in their ekklesia,
who received from Kleisthenês the real attributes of sovereignty,—it
was by him also that the people were first called into direct action
as dikasts, or jurors. I have already remarked, that this custom may
be said, in a certain limited sense, to have begun in the time of
Solon, since that lawgiver invested the popular assembly with the
power of pronouncing the judgment of accountability upon the archons
after their year of office. Here, again, the building, afterwards
so spacious and stately, was erected on a Solonian foundation,
though it was not itself Solonian. That the popular dikasteries, in
the elaborate form in which they existed from Periklês downward,
were introduced all at once by Kleisthenês, it is impossible to
believe; yet the steps by which they were gradually wrought out
are not distinctly discoverable. It would rather seem, that at
first only the aggregate body of citizens above thirty years of
age exercised judicial functions, being specially convoked and
sworn to try persons accused of public crimes, and when so employed
bearing the name of the heliæa, or heliasts; private offences and
disputes between man and man being still determined by individual
magistrates in the city, and a considerable judicial power still
residing in the Senate of Areopagus. There is reason to believe that
this was the state of things established by Kleisthenês, and which
afterwards came to be altered by the greater extent of judicial
duty gradually accruing to the heliasts, so that it was necessary
to subdivide the collective heliæa. According to the subdivision,
as practised in the times best known, six thousand citizens above
thirty years of age were annually selected by lot out of the whole
number, six hundred from each of the ten tribes: five thousand of
these citizens were arranged in ten pannels or decuries of five
hundred each, the remaining one thousand being reserved to fill up
vacancies in case of death or absence among the former. The whole
six thousand took a prescribed oath, couched in very striking words,
and every man received a ticket inscribed with his own name as well
as with a letter designating his decury. When there were causes or
crimes ripe for trial, the thesmothets, or six inferior archons,
determined by lot, first, which decuries should sit, according to
the number wanted,—next, in which court, or under the presidency
of what magistrate, the decury B or E should sit, so that it could
not be known beforehand in what cause each would be judge. In the
number of persons who actually attended and sat, however, there
seems to have been much variety, and sometimes two decuries sat
together.[258] The arrangement here described, we must recollect, is
given to us as belonging to those times when the dikasts received a
regular pay, after every day’s sitting; and it can hardly have long
continued without that condition, which was not realized before
the time of Periklês. Each of these decuries sitting in judicature
was called _The Heliæa_,—a name which belongs properly to the
collective assembly of the people; this collective assembly having
been itself the original judicature. I conceive that the practice of
distributing this collective assembly, or heliæa, into sections of
jurors for judicial duty, may have begun under one form or another
soon after the reform of Kleisthenês, since the direct interference
of the people in public affairs tended more and more to increase. But
it could only have been matured by degrees into that constant and
systematic service which the pay of Periklês called forth at last in
completeness. Under the last-mentioned system the judicial competence
of the archons was annulled, and the third archon, or polemarch,
withdrawn from all military functions. Still, this had not been yet
done at the time of the battle of Marathon, in which Kallimachus the
polemarch not only commanded along with the stratêgi, but enjoyed a
sort of preëminence over them: nor had it been done during the year
after the battle of Marathon, in which Aristeidês was archon,—for
the magisterial decisions of Aristeidês formed one of the principal
foundations of his honorable surname, the Just.[259]
[258] See in particular on this subject the treatise of Schömann,
De Sortitione Judicum (Gripswald, 1820), and the work of the
same author, Antiq. Jur. Publ. Græc. ch. 49-55, p. 264, _seqq._;
also Heffter, Die Athenäische Gerichtsverfassung, part ii, ch.
2, p. 51, _seqq._; Meier and Schömann, Der Attische Prozess, pp.
127-135.
The views of Schömann respecting the sortition of the Athenian
jurors have been bitterly attacked, but in no way refuted, by F.
V. Fritzsche (De Sortitione Judicum apud Athenienses Conmentatio,
Leipsic, 1835).
Two or three of these dikastic tickets, marking the name and the
deme of the citizen, and the letter of the decury to which during
that particular year he belonged, have been recently dug up near
Athens:—
Δ. Διόδωρος Ε. Δεινίας
Φρεάῤῥιος. Ἀλαιεύς.
(Boeckh, Corp. Inscrip. Nos. 207-208.)
Fritzsche (p. 73) considers these to be tickets of senators, not
of dikasts, contrary to all probability.
For the Heliastic oath, and its remarkable particulars, see
Demosthen. cont. Timokrat. p. 746. See also Aristophanês, Plutus,
277 (with the valuable Scholia, though from different hands and
not all of equal correctness) and 972; Ekklesiazusæ, 678, _seqq._
[259] Plutarch, Arist. 7; Herodot. vi, 109-111.
With this question, as to the comparative extent of judicial power
vested by Kleisthenês in the popular dikastery and the archons, are
in reality connected two others in Athenian constitutional law;
relating, first, to the admissibility of all citizens for the post
of archon,—next, to the choosing of archons by lot. It is well known
that, in the time of Periklês, the archons, and various other
individual functionaries, had come to be chosen by lot,—moreover, all
citizens were legally admissible, and might give in their names to be
drawn for by lot, subject to what was called the dokimasy, or legal
examination into their status of citizen, and into various moral
and religious qualifications, before they took office; while at the
same time the function of the archon had become nothing higher than
preliminary examination of parties and witnesses for the dikastery,
and presidence over it when afterwards assembled, together with the
power of imposing by authority a fine of small amount upon inferior
offenders.
Now all these three political arrangements hang essentially together.
The great value of the lot, according to Grecian democratical ideas,
was that it equalized the chance of office between rich and poor. But
so long as the poor citizens were legally inadmissible, choice by lot
could have no recommendation either to the rich or to the poor; in
fact, it would be less democratical than election by the general mass
of citizens, because the poor citizen would under the latter system
enjoy an important right of interference by means of his suffrage,
though he could not be elected himself.[260] Again, choice by lot
could never under any circumstances be applied to those posts where
special competence, and a certain measure of attributes possessed
only by a few, could not be dispensed with without obvious peril,—nor
was it ever applied, throughout the whole history of democratical
Athens, to the stratêgi, or generals, who were always elected by
show of hands of the assembled citizens. Accordingly, we may regard
it as certain that, at the time when the archons first came to be
chosen by lot, the superior and responsible duties once attached
to that office had been, or were in course of being, detached from
it, and transferred either to the popular dikasts or to the ten
elected stratêgi: so that there remained to these archons only a
routine of police and administration, important indeed to the state,
yet such as could be executed by any citizen of average probity,
diligence, and capacity. At least there was no obvious absurdity
in thinking so; and the dokimasy excluded from the office men of
notoriously discreditable life, even after they might have drawn the
successful lot. Periklês,[261] though chosen stratêgus, year after
year successively, was never archon; and it may even be doubted
whether men of first-rate talents and ambition often gave in their
names for the office. To those of smaller aspirations[262] it was
doubtless a source of importance, but it imposed troublesome labor,
gave no pay, and entailed a certain degree of peril upon any archon
who might have given offence to powerful men, when he came to pass
through the trial of accountability which followed immediately upon
his year of office. There was little to make the office acceptable
either to very poor men, or to very rich and ambitious men; and
between the middling persons who gave in their names, any one might
be taken without great practical mischief, always assuming the two
guarantees of the dokimasy before, and accountability after, office.
This was the conclusion—in my opinion a mistaken conclusion, and such
as would find no favor at present—to which the democrats of Athens
were conducted by their strenuous desire to equalize the chances of
office for rich and poor. But their sentiment seems to have been
satisfied by a partial enforcement of the lot to the choice of some
offices,—especially the archons, as the primitive chief magistrates
of the state,—without applying it to all, or to the most responsible
and difficult. Nor would they have applied it to the archons, if it
had been indispensably necessary that these magistrates should retain
their original very serious duty of judging disputes and condemning
offenders.
[260] Aristotle puts these two together; election of magistrates
by the mass of the citizens, but only out of persons possessing
a high pecuniary qualification; this he ranks as the least
democratical democracy, if one may use the phrase (Politic.
iii, 6-11), or a mean between democracy and oligarchy,—an
ἀριστοκρατία, or πολιτεῖα, in his sense of the word (iv, 7, 3).
He puts the employment of the lot as a symptom of decisive and
extreme democracy, such as would never tolerate a pecuniary
qualification of eligibility.
So again Plato (Legg. iii, p. 692), after remarking that the
legislator of Sparta first provided the senate, next the ephors,
as a bridle upon the kings, says of the ephors that they were
“something nearly approaching to an authority emanating from the
lot,”—οἷον ψάλιον ἐνέβαλεν αὐτῇ τὴν τῶν ἐφόρων δύναμιν, ἐγγὺς τῆς
κληρωτῆς ἀγαγὼν δυνάμεως.
Upon which passage there are some good remarks in Schömann’s
edition of Plutarch’s Lives of Agis and Kleomenês (Comment. ad
Ag. c. 8, p. 119). It is to be recollected that the actual mode
in which the Spartan ephors were chosen, as I have already stated
in my first volume, cannot be clearly made out, and has been much
debated by critics:—
“Mihi hæc verba, quum illud quidem manifestum faciant, quod etiam
aliunde constat, sorte captos ephoros non esse, tum hoc alterum,
quod Hermannus statuit, creationem sortitioni non absimilem
fuisse, nequaquam demonstrare videntur. Nimirum nihil aliud nisi
prope accedere ephororum magistratus ad cos dicitur, qui sortito
capiantur. _Sortitis autem magistratibus hoc maxime proprium est,
ut promiscue—non ex genere, censu, dignitate—a quolibet capi
possint_: quamobrem quum ephori quoque fere promiscue fierent ex
omni multitudine civium, poterat haud dubie magistratus eorum
ἐγγὺς τῆς κληρωτῆς δυνάμεως esse dici, etiamsi αἱρετοὶ essent—h.
e. suffragiis creati. Et video Lachmannum quoque, p. 165, not. 1,
de Platonis loco similiter judicare.”
The employment of the lot, as Schömann remarks, implies universal
admissibility of all citizens to office: though the converse does
not hold good,—the latter does not of necessity imply the former.
Now, as we know that universal admissibility did not become
the law of Athens until after the battle of Platæa, so we may
conclude that the employment of the lot had no place before that
epoch,—_i. e._ had no place under the constitution of Kleisthenês.
[261] Plutarch, Periklês, c. 9-16.
[262] See a passage about such characters in Plato, Republic, v,
p. 475 B.
I think, therefore, that these three points: 1. The opening of the
post of archon to all citizens indiscriminately; 2. The choice of
archons by lot; 3. The diminished range of the archon’s duties and
responsibilities, through the extension of those belonging to the
popular courts of justice on the one hand and to the stratêgi on the
other—are all connected together, and must have been simultaneous,
or nearly simultaneous, in the time of introduction: the enactment
of universal admissibility to office certainly not coming after the
other two, and probably coming a little before them.
Now in regard to the eligibility of all Athenians indiscriminately to
the office of archon, we find a clear and positive testimony as to
the time when it was first introduced. Plutarch tells us[263] that
the oligarchical,[264] but high-principled Aristeidês, was himself
the proposer of this constitutional change,—shortly after the battle
of Platæa, with the consequent expulsion of the Persians from Greece,
and the return of the refugee Athenians to their ruined city. Seldom
has it happened in the history of mankind, that rich and poor have
been so completely equalized as among the population of Athens in
that memorable expatriation and heroic struggle. Nor are we at all
surprised to hear that the mass of the citizens, coming back with
freshly-kindled patriotism as well as with the consciousness that
their country had only been recovered by the equal efforts of all,
would no longer submit to be legally disqualified from any office
of state. It was on this occasion that the constitution was first
made really “common” to all, and that the archons, stratêgi, and all
functionaries, first began to be chosen from all Athenians without
any difference of legal eligibility.[265] No mention is made of the
lot, in this important statement of Plutarch, which appears to me
every way worthy of credit, and which teaches us that, down to the
invasion of Xerxês, not only had the exclusive principle of the
Solonian law of qualification continued in force (whereby the first
three classes on the census were alone admitted to all individual
offices, and the fourth or Thêtic class excluded), but also the
archons had hitherto been elected by the citizens,—not taken by lot.
[263] Plutarch, Arist. 22.
[264] So at least the supporters of the constitution of
Kleisthenês were called by the contemporaries of Periklês.
[265] Plutarch, Arist. _ut sup._ γράφει ψήφισμα, κοινὴν εἶναι τὴν
πολιτείαν, καὶ τοὺς ἄρχοντας ἐξ Ἀθηναίων πάντων αἱρεῖσθαι.
Now for financial purposes, the quadruple census of Solon was
retained long after this period, even beyond the Peloponnesian war
and the oligarchy of Thirty. But we thus learn that Kleisthenês in
his constitution retained it for political purposes also, in part at
least: he recognized the exclusion of the great mass of the citizens
from all individual offices,—such as the archon, the stratêgus, etc.
In his time, probably, no complaints were raised on the subject. His
constitution gave to the collective bodies—senate, ekklesia, and
heliæa, or dikastery—a degree of power and importance such as they
had never before known or imagined: and we may well suppose that the
Athenian people of that day had no objection even to the proclaimed
system and theory of being exclusively governed by men of wealth
and station as individual magistrates,—especially since many of the
newly-enfranchised citizens had been previously metics and slaves.
Indeed, it is to be added that, even under the full democracy of
later Athens, though the people had then become passionately attached
to the theory of equal admissibility of all citizens to office, yet,
in practice, poor men seldom obtained offices which were elected by
the general vote, as will appear more fully in the course of this
history.[266]
[266] So in the Italian republics of the twelfth and thirteenth
century, the nobles long continued to possess the exclusive right
of being elected to the consulate and the great offices of state,
even after those offices had come to be elected by the people:
the habitual misrule and oppression of the nobles gradually put
an end to this right, and even created in many towns a resolution
positively to exclude them. At Milan, towards the end of the
twelfth century, the twelve consuls, with the Podestat, possessed
all the powers of government: these consuls were nominated by
one hundred electors chosen by and among the people. Sismondi
observes: “Cependant le peuple imposa lui-même a ces électeurs,
la règle fondamentale de choisir tous les magistrats dans le
corps de la noblesse. Ce n’étoit point encore la possession des
magistratures que l’on contestoit aux gentilshommes: on demandoit
seulement qu’ils fussent les mandataires immédiats de la nation.
Mais plus d’une fois, en dépit du droit incontestable des
citoyens, les consuls regnant s’attribuèrent l’élection de leurs
successeurs.” (Sismondi, Histoire des Républiques Italiennes,
chap. xii, vol. ii, p. 240.)
The choice of the stratêgi remained ever afterwards upon the footing
on which Aristeidês thus placed it. But the lot for the choice of
archon must have been introduced shortly after his proposition of
universal eligibility, and in consequence too of the same tide of
democratical feeling,—introduced as a farther corrective, because the
poor citizen, though he had become eligible, was nevertheless not
elected. And at the same time, I imagine, that elaborate distribution
of the Heliæa, or aggregate body of dikasts, or jurors, into separate
pannels, or dikasteries, for the decision of judicial matters, was
first regularized. It was this change that stole away from the
archons so important a part of their previous jurisdiction: it was
this change that Periklês more fully consummated by insuring pay
to the dikasts. But the present is not the time to enter into the
modifications which Athens underwent during the generation after the
battle of Platæa. They have been here briefly noticed for the purpose
of reasoning back, in the absence of direct evidence, to Athens as
it stood in the generation before that memorable battle, after the
reform of Kleisthenês. His reform, though highly democratical,
stopped short of the mature democracy which prevailed from Periklês
to Demosthenês, in three ways especially, among various others;
and it is therefore sometimes considered by the later writers as
an aristocratical constitution:[267] 1. It still recognized the
archons as judges to a considerable extent, and the third archon, or
polemarch, as joint military commander along with the stratêgi. 2.
It retained them as elected annually by the body of citizens, not as
chosen by lot.[268] 3. It still excluded the fourth class of the
Solonian census from all individual office, the archonship among the
rest. The Solonian law of exclusion, however, though retained in
principle, was mitigated in practice thus far,—that whereas Solon
had rendered none but members of the highest class on the census
(the Pentakosiomedimni) eligible to the archonship, Kleisthenês
opened that dignity to all the first three classes, shutting out
only the fourth. That he did this may be inferred from the fact that
Aristeidês, assuredly not a rich man, became archon.
[267] Plutarch, Kimon, c. 15. τὴν ἐπὶ Κλεισθένους ἐγείρειν
ἀριστοκρατίαν πειρωμένου: compare Plutarch, Aristeidês, c. 2, and
Isokratês, Areopagiticus, Or. vii, p. 143, p. 192, ed. Bek.
[268] Herodotus speaks of Kallimachus the Polemarch, at Marathon,
as ὁ τῷ κυάμῳ λαχὼν Πολέμαρχος (vi, 110).
I cannot but think that in this case he transfers to the year
490 B. C. the practice of his own time. The polemarch, at the
time of the battle of Marathon, was in a certain sense the first
stratêgus; and the stratêgi were never taken by lot, but always
chosen by show of hands, even to the end of the democracy. It
seems impossible to believe that the stratêgi were elected, and
that the polemarch, at the time when his functions were the same
as theirs, was chosen by lot.
Herodotus seems to have conceived the choice of magistrates by
lot as being of the essence of a democracy (Herodot. iii, 80).
Plutarch also (Periklês, c. 9) seems to have conceived the
choice of archons by lot as a very ancient institution of
Athens: nevertheless, it results from the first chapter of his
life of Aristeidês,—an obscure chapter, in which conflicting
authorities are mentioned without being well discriminated,—that
Aristeidês was _chosen archon by the people_,—not drawn by lot:
an additional reason for believing this is, that he was archon in
the year following the battle of Marathon, at which, he had been
one of the ten generals. Idomeneus distinctly affirmed this to be
the fact.—οὐ κυαμευτὸν, ἀλλ᾽ ἑλομένων Ἀθηναίων (Plutarch, Arist.
c. 1).
Isokratês also (Areopagit. Or. vii, p. 144, p. 195, ed. Bekker)
conceived the constitution of Kleisthenês as including all
the three points noticed in the text: 1. A high pecuniary
qualification of eligibility for individual offices. 2. Election
to these offices by all the citizens, and accountability to the
same after office. 3. No employment of the lot.—He even contends
that this election is more truly democratical than sortition;
since the latter process might admit men attached to oligarchy,
which would not happen under the former,—ἔπειτα καὶ δημοτικωτέραν
ἐνόμιζον ταύτην τὴν κατάστασιν ἢ τὴν διὰ τοῦ λαγχάνειν
γιγνομένην· ἐν μὲν γὰρ τῇ κληρώσει τὴν τύχην βραβεύσειν, καὶ
πολλάκις λήψεσθαι τὰς ἀρχὰς τοὺς τῆς ὀλιγαρχίας ἐπιθυμοῦντας,
etc. This would be a good argument if there were no pecuniary
qualification for eligibility,—such pecuniary qualification is
a provision which he lays down, but which he does not find it
convenient to insist upon emphatically.
I do not here advert to the γραφὴ παρανόμων, the νομοφύλακες, and
the sworn νομόθεται,—all of them institutions belonging to the
time of Periklês at the earliest; not to that of Kleisthenês.
I am also inclined to believe that the Senate of Five Hundred, as
constituted by Kleisthenês, was taken, not by election, but by lot,
from the ten tribes,—and that every citizen became eligible to it.
Election for this purpose—that is, the privilege of annually electing
a batch of fifty senators, all at once, by each tribe—would probably
be thought more troublesome than valuable; nor do we hear of separate
meetings of each tribe for purposes of election. Moreover, the office
of senator was a collective, not an individual office; the shock,
therefore, to the feelings of semi-democratized Athens, from the
unpleasant idea of a poor man sitting among the fifty prytanes, would
be less than if they conceived him as polemarch at the head of the
right wing of the army, or as an archon administering justice.
A farther difference between the constitution of Solon and that
of Kleisthenês is to be found in the position of the Senate of
Areopagus. Under the former, that senate had been the principal
body in the state, and he had even enlarged its powers; under the
latter, it must have been treated at first as an enemy, and kept
down. For as it was composed only of all the past archons, and as,
during the preceding thirty years, every archon had been a creature
of the Peisistratids, the Areopagites collectively must have been
both hostile and odious to Kleisthenês and his partisans,—perhaps a
fraction of its members might even retire into exile with Hippias.
Its influence must have been sensibly lessened by the change
of party, until it came to be gradually filled by fresh archons
springing from the bosom of the Kleisthenean constitution. But during
this important interval, the new-modelled Senate of Five Hundred,
and the popular assembly, stepped into that ascendency which they
never afterwards lost. From the time of Kleisthenês forward, the
Areopagites cease to be the chief and prominent power in the state:
yet they are still considerable; and when the second fill of the
democratical tide took place, after the battle of Platæa, they
became the focus of that which was then considered as the party of
oligarchical resistance. I have already remarked that the archons,
during the intermediate time (about 509-477 B. C.), were all elected
by the ekklesia, not chosen by lot,—and that the fourth (or poorest
and most numerous) class on the census were by law then ineligible;
while election at Athens, even when every citizen without exception
was an elector and eligible, had a natural tendency to fall upon
men of wealth and station. We thus see how it happened that the
past archons, when united in the Senate of Areopagus, infused into
that body the sympathies, prejudices, and interests of the richer
classes. It was this which brought them into conflict with the more
democratical party headed by Periklês and Ephialtês, in times when
portions of the Kleisthenean constitution had come to be discredited
as too much imbued with oligarchy.
One other remarkable institution, distinctly ascribed to Kleisthenês,
yet remains to be noticed,—the Ostracism; upon which I have already
made some remarks,[269] in touching upon the memorable Solonian
proclamation against neutrality in a sedition. It is hardly too much
to say that, without this protective process, none of the other
institutions would have reached maturity.
[269] See above, chap. xi. vol. iii. p. 145.
By the ostracism, a citizen was banished without special accusation,
trial, or defence, for a term of ten years,—subsequently diminished
to five. His property was not taken away, nor his reputation
tainted; so that the penalty consisted solely in the banishment from
his native city to some other Greek city. As to reputation, the
ostracism was a compliment rather than otherwise;[270] and so it was
vividly felt to be, when, about ninety years after Kleisthenês, the
conspiracy between Nikias and Alkibiadês fixed it upon Hyperbolus.
The two former had both recommended the taking of an ostracizing
vote, each hoping to cause the banishment of the other; but before
the day arrived, they accommodated the difference. To fire off the
safety-gun of the republic against a person so little dangerous as
Hyperbolus, was denounced as the prostitution of a great political
ceremony: “it was not against such men as him (said the comic writer,
Plato),[271] that the oyster-shell (or potsherd) was intended to be
used.” The process of ostracism was carried into effect by writing
upon a shell, or potsherd, the name of the person whom a citizen
thought it prudent for a time to banish; which shell, when deposited
in the proper vessel, counted for a vote towards the sentence.
[270] Aristeidês Rhetor. Orat. xlvi. vol ii. p. 317, ed. Dindorf.
[271] Plutarch (Nikias, c. 11; Alkibiad. c. 13; Aristeid. c. 7):
Thucyd. viii, 73. Plato Comicus said, respecting Hyperbolus—
Οὐ γὰρ τοιούτων οὕνεκ᾽ ὄστραχ᾽ ηὑρέθη.
Theophrastus had stated that Phæax, and not Nikias, was the rival
of Alkibiadês on this occasion, when Hyperbolus was ostracized;
but most authors, says Plutarch, represent Nikias as the person.
It is curious that there should be any difference of statement
about a fact so notorious, and in the best-known time of Athenian
history.
Taylor thinks that the oration which now passes as that of
Andokidês against Alkibiadês, is really by Phæax, and was read
by Plutarch as the oration of Phæax in an actual contest of
ostracism between Phæax, Nikias, and Alkibiadês. He is opposed by
Ruhnken and Valckenaer (see Sluiter’s preface to that oration, c.
1, and Ruhnken, Hist. Critic. Oratt. Græcor. p. 135). I cannot
agree with either: I cannot think with him, that it is a real
oration of Phæax; nor with them, that it is a real oration in any
genuine cause of ostracism whatever. It appears to me to have
been composed after the ostracism had fallen into desuetude,
and when the Athenians had not only become somewhat ashamed
of it, but had lost the familiar conception of what it really
was. For how otherwise can we explain the fact, that the author
of that oration complains that he is about to be ostracized
without any secret voting, in which the very essence of the
ostracism consisted, and from which its name was borrowed (οὔτε
διαψηφισαμένων κρυβδὴν, c. 2)? His oration is framed as if the
audience whom he was addressing were about to ostracize one out
of the three, by show of hands. But the process of ostracizing
included no meeting and haranguing,—nothing but simple deposit of
the shells in a cask; as may be seen by the description of the
special railing-in of the agora, and by the story (true or false)
of the unlettered country-citizen coming into the city to give
his vote, and asking Aristeidês, without even knowing his person,
to write the name for him on the shell (Plutarch, Aristeid. c.
7). There was, indeed, previous discussion in the senate as
well as in the ekklesia, whether a vote of ostracism should be
entered upon at all; but the author of the oration to which I
allude does not address himself to _that_ question; he assumes
that the vote is actually about to be taken, and that one of the
three—himself, Nikias, or Alkibiadês—must be ostracized (c. 1).
Now, doubtless, in practice, the decision commonly lay between
two formidable rivals; but it was not publicly or formally put so
before the people: every citizen might write upon the shell such
name as he chose. Farther, the open denunciation of the injustice
of ostracism as a system (c. 2), proves an age later than the
banishment of Hyperbolus. Moreover, the author having begun by
remarking that he stands in contest with Nikias as well as with
Alkibiadês, says nothing more about Nikias to the end of the
speech.
I have already observed that all the governments of the Grecian
cities, when we compare them with that idea which a modern reader is
apt to conceive of the measure of force belonging to a government,
were essentially weak, the good as well as the bad,—the democratical,
the oligarchical, and the despotic. The force in the hands of any
government, to cope with conspirators or mutineers, was extremely
small, with the single exception of a despot surrounded by his
mercenary troop; so that no tolerably sustained conspiracy or usurper
could be put down except by the direct aid of the people in support
of the government; which amounted to a dissolution, for the time,
of constitutional authority, and was pregnant with reactionary
consequences such as no man could foresee. To prevent powerful men
from attempting usurpation was, therefore, of the greatest possible
moment; and a despot or an oligarchy might exercise preventive means
at pleasure,[272] much sharper than the ostracism, such as the
assassination of Kimon, mentioned in my last chapter, as directed
by the Peisistratids. At the very least, they might send away any
one, from whom they apprehended attack or danger, without incurring
even so much as the imputation of severity. But in a democracy,
where arbitrary action of the magistrate was the thing of all
others most dreaded, and where fixed laws, with trial and defence
as preliminaries to punishment, were conceived by the ordinary
citizen as the guarantees of his personal security and as the pride
of his social condition,—the creation of such an exceptional power
presented serious difficulty. If we transport ourselves to the times
of Kleisthenês, immediately after the expulsion of the Peisistratids,
when the working of the democratical machinery was as yet untried,
we shall find this difficulty at its maximum; but we shall also
find the necessity of vesting such a power somewhere absolutely
imperative. For the great Athenian nobles had yet to learn the lesson
of respect for any constitution; their past history had exhibited
continual struggles between the armed factions of Megaklês, Lykurgus,
and Peisistratus, put down after a time by the superior force and
alliances of the latter. And though Kleisthenês, the son of Megaklês,
might be firmly disposed to renounce the example of his father, and
to act as the faithful citizen of a fixed constitution,—he would know
but too well that the sons of his father’s companions and rivals
would follow out ambitious purposes without any regard to the limits
imposed by law, if ever they acquired sufficient partisans to present
a fair prospect of success. Moreover, when any two candidates for
power, with such reckless dispositions, came into a bitter personal
rivalry, the motives to each of them, arising as well out of fear
as out of ambition, to put down his opponent at any cost to the
constitution, might well become irresistible, unless some impartial
and discerning interference could arrest the strife in time. “If the
Athenians were wise (Aristeidês is reported to have said,[273] in the
height and peril of his parliamentary struggle with Themistoklês),
they would cast both Themistoklês and me into the barathrum.”[274]
And whoever reads the sad narrative of the Korkyræan sedition, in
the third book of Thucydidês, together with the reflections of the
historian upon it,[275] will trace the gradual exasperation of these
party feuds, beginning even under democratical forms, until at length
they break down the barriers of public as well as of private morality.
[272] See the discussion of the ostracism in Aristot. Politic.
iii, 8, where he recognizes the problem as one common to all
governments.
Compare, also, a good Dissertation—J. A. Paradys, De Ostracismo
Atheniensium, Lugduni Batavor. 1793; K. F. Hermann, Lehrbuch der
Griechischen Staatsalterthümer, ch. 130; and Schömann, Antiq.
Jur. Pub. Græc. ch. xxxv, p. 233.
[273] Plutarch, Aristeid. c. 3.