Pisistratus left three legitimate sons--Hippias, Hipparchus, and
Thessalus: the general belief at Athens among the contemporaries of
Thucydides was, that Hipparchus was the eldest of the three and had
succeeded him; but the historian emphatically pronounces this to be a
mistake, and certifies, upon his own responsibility, that Hippias was
both eldest son and successor. Such an assurance from him, fortified by
certain reasons in themselves not very conclusive, is sufficient ground
for our belief, the more so as Herodotus countenances the same version.
But we are surprised at such a degree of historical carelessness in
the Athenian public, and seemingly even in Plato, about a matter both
interesting and comparatively recent. In order to abate this surprise,
and to explain how the name of Hipparchus came to supplant that of
Hippias in the popular talk, Thucydides recounts the memorable story of
Harmodius and Aristogiton.
Of these two Athenian citizens, both belonging to the ancient _gens_
called Gephyræi, the former was a beautiful youth, attached to the latter
by a mutual friendship and devoted intimacy which Grecian manners did
not condemn. Hipparchus made repeated propositions to Harmodius, which
were repelled, but which, on becoming known to Aristogiton, excited
both his jealousy and his fears lest the disappointed suitor should
employ force--fears justified by the proceedings not unusual with
Grecian despots, and by the absence of all legal protection against
outrage from such a quarter. Under these feelings, he began to look
about, in the best way that he could, for some means of putting down the
despotism. Meanwhile Hipparchus, though not entertaining any designs of
violence, was so incensed at the refusal of Harmodius, that he could
not be satisfied without doing something to insult or humiliate him. In
order to conceal the motive from which the insult really proceeded, he
offered it, not directly to Harmodius, but to his sister. He caused this
young maiden to be one day summoned to take her station in a religious
procession as one of the _canephoræ_, or basket-carriers, according to
the practice usual at Athens; but when she arrived at the place where
her fellow-maidens were assembled, she was dismissed with scorn as
unworthy of so respectable a function, and the summons addressed to her
was disavowed. An insult thus publicly offered filled Harmodius with
indignation, and still further exasperated the feelings of Aristogiton:
both of them, resolving at all hazards to put an end to the despotism,
concerted means for aggression with a few select associates. They
awaited the festival of the Great Panathenæa, wherein the body of the
citizens were accustomed to march up in armed procession, with spear
and shield, to the Acropolis; this being the only day on which an armed
body could come together without suspicion. The conspirators appeared
armed like the rest of the citizens, but carrying concealed daggers
besides. Harmodius and Aristogiton undertook with their own hands to
kill the two Pisistratidæ, while the rest promised to stand forward
immediately for their protection against the foreign mercenaries; and
though the whole number of persons engaged was small, they counted upon
the spontaneous sympathies of the armed bystanders in an effort to
regain their liberties, so soon as the blow should once be struck. The
day of the festival having arrived, Hippias, with his foreign bodyguard
around him, was marshalling the armed citizens for procession, in the
Ceramicus without the gates, when Harmodius and Aristogiton approached
with concealed daggers to execute their purpose. On coming near, they
were thunder-struck to behold one of their own fellow-conspirators
talking familiarly with Hippias, who was of easy access to every man;
and they immediately concluded that the plot was betrayed. Expecting to
be seized, and wrought up to a state of desperation, they resolved at
least not to die without having revenged themselves on Hipparchus, whom
they found within the city gates near the chapel called the Leocorion,
and immediately slew him. His attendant guards killed Harmodius on the
spot; while Aristogiton, rescued for the moment by the surrounding crowd,
was afterwards taken, and perished in the tortures applied to make him
disclose his accomplices.
The news flew quickly to Hippias in the Ceramicus, who heard it earlier
than the armed citizens near him, awaiting his order for the commencement
of the procession. With extraordinary self-command, he took advantage
of this precious instant of foreknowledge, and advanced towards them,
commanding them to drop their arms for a short time, and assemble on an
adjoining ground. They unsuspectingly obeyed, and he immediately directed
his guards to take possession of the vacant arms. He was now undisputed
master, and enabled to seize the persons of all those citizens whom he
mistrusted, especially all those who had daggers about them, which it was
not the practice to carry in the Panathenaic procession.
Such is the memorable narrative of Harmodius and Aristogiton, peculiarly
valuable inasmuch as it all comes from Thucydides. To possess great
power, to be above legal restraint, to inspire extraordinary fear, is
a privilege so much coveted by the giants among mankind, that we may
well take notice of those cases in which it brings misfortune even upon
themselves. The fear inspired by Hipparchus--of designs which he did not
really entertain, but was likely to entertain, and competent to execute
without hindrance--was here the grand cause of his destruction.
[Sidenote: [514-510 B.C.]]
The conspiracy here detailed happened in 514 B.C., during the thirteenth
year of the reign of Hippias, which lasted four years longer, until 510
B.C. And these last four years, in the belief of the Athenian public,
counted for his whole reign; nay, many of them made the still greater
historical mistake of eliding these last four years altogether, and
of supposing that the conspiracy of Harmodius and Aristogiton had
deposed the Pisistratid government and liberated Athens. Both poets and
philosophers shared this faith, which is distinctly put forth in the
beautiful and popular _scolion_ or song on the subject: the two friends
are there celebrated as the authors of liberty at Athens--“they slew the
despot and gave to Athens equal laws.” So inestimable a present was alone
sufficient to enshrine in the minds of the subsequent democracy those
who had sold their lives to purchase it: and we must further recollect
that the intimate connection between the two, so repugnant to the modern
reader, was regarded at Athens with sympathy, so that the story took
hold of the Athenian mind by the vein of romance conjointly with that
of patriotism. Harmodius and Aristogiton were afterwards commemorated
both as the winners and as the protomartyrs of Athenian liberty. Statues
were erected in their honour shortly after the final expulsion of the
Pisistratidæ; immunity from taxes and public burdens was granted to the
descendants of their families; and the speaker who proposed the abolition
of such immunities, at a time when the number had been abusively
multiplied, made his only special exception in favour of this respected
lineage. And since the name of Hipparchus was universally notorious as
the person slain, we discover how it was that he came to be considered
by an uncritical public as the predominant member of the Pisistratid
family,--the eldest son and successor of Pisistratus, the reigning
despot,--to the comparative neglect of Hippias. The same public probably
cherished many other anecdotes, not the less eagerly believed because
they could not be authenticated, respecting this eventful period.
Whatever may have been the moderation of Hippias before, indignation at
the death of his brother and fear for his own safety, now induced him
to drop it altogether. It is attested both by Thucydides and Herodotus,
and admits of no doubt, that his power was now employed harshly and
cruelly--that he put to death a considerable number of citizens. We
find also a statement, noway improbable in itself, and affirmed both
in Pausanias and in Plutarch,--inferior authorities, yet still in this
case sufficiently credible,--that he caused Leæna, the mistress of
Aristogiton, to be tortured to death, in order to extort from her a
knowledge of the secrets and accomplices of the latter. But as he could
not but be sensible that this system of terrorism was full of peril
to himself, so he looked out for shelter and support in case of being
expelled from Athens; and with this view he sought to connect himself
with Darius, king of Persia--a connection full of consequences to be
hereafter developed. Æantides, son of Hippoclus the despot of Lampsacus
on the Hellespont, stood high at this time in the favour of the Persian
monarch, which induced Hippias to give him his daughter Archedice in
marriage; no small honour to the Lampsacene, in the estimation of
Thucydides. To explain how Hippias came to fix upon this town, however,
it is necessary to say a few words on the foreign policy of the
Pisistratidæ.
[Sidenote: [537-515 B.C.]]
The expedition of Miltiades to the Chersonesus, as described in the
previous chapter, must have occurred early after the first usurpation
of Pisistratus, since even his imprisonment by the Lampsacenes
happened before the ruin of Crœsus (546 B.C.). But it was not till
much later,--probably during the third and most powerful period of
Pisistratus,--that the latter undertook his expedition against Sigeum
in the Troad. This place appears to have fallen into the hands of the
Mytileneans: Pisistratus retook it, and placed there his illegitimate
son Hegesistratus as despot. The Mytileneans may have been enfeebled at
this time (somewhere between 537-527 B.C.), not only by the strides of
Persian conquest on the mainland, but also by the ruinous defeat which
they suffered from Polycrates and the Samians. Hegesistratus maintained
the place against various hostile attempts, throughout all the reign of
Hippias, so that the Athenian possessions in those regions comprehended
at this period both the Chersonesus and Sigeum. To the former of the two,
Hippias sent out Miltiades, nephew of the first _œcist_, as governor,
after the death of his brother Stesagoras. The new governor found much
discontent in the peninsula, but succeeded in subduing it by entrapping
and imprisoning the principal men in each town. He further took into
his pay a regiment of five hundred mercenaries, and married Hegesipyle,
daughter of the Thracian king Olorus. It appears to have been about 515
B.C. that this second Miltiades went out to the Chersonesus. He seems to
have been obliged to quit it for a time, after the Scythian expedition
of Darius, in consequence of having incurred the hostility of the
Persians; but he was there from the beginning of the Ionic revolt until
about 493 B.C., or two or three years before the battle of Marathon, on
which occasion we shall find him acting-commander of the Athenian army.
Both the Chersonesus and Sigeum, though Athenian possessions, were,
however, now tributary and dependent on Persia. And it was to this
quarter that Hippias, during his last years of alarm, looked for support
in the event of being expelled from Athens: he calculated upon Sigeum as
a shelter, and upon Æantides, as well as Darius, as an ally. Neither the
one nor the other failed him.
The same circumstances which alarmed Hippias, and rendered his dominion
in Attica at once more oppressive and more odious, tended of course to
raise the hopes of his enemies, the Athenian exiles, with the powerful
Alcmæonidæ at their head. Believing the favourable moment to be come,
they even ventured upon an invasion of Attica, and occupied a post called
Leipsydrion in the mountain range of Parnes, which separates Attica from
Bœotia. But their schemes altogether failed: Hippias defeated and drove
them out of the country. His dominion now seemed confirmed, for the
Lacedæmonians were on terms of intimate friendship with him; and Amyntas,
king of Macedon, as well as the Thessalians were his allies. Yet the
exiles whom he had beaten in the open field succeeded in an unexpected
manœuvre, which, favoured by circumstances, proved his ruin.
[Sidenote: [548-514 B.C.]]
By an accident which had occurred in the year 548 B.C., the Delphian
Temple was set on fire and burnt. To repair this grave loss was an object
of solicitude to all Greece; but the outlay required was exceedingly
heavy, and it appears to have been long before the money could be
collected. The Amphictyons decreed that one-fourth of the cost should
be borne by the Delphians themselves, who found themselves so heavily
taxed by this assessment, that they sent envoys throughout all Greece to
collect subscriptions in aid, and received, among other donations, from
the Greek settlers in Egypt twenty minæ, besides a large present of alum
from the Egyptian king Amasis [Aahmes II]: their munificent benefactor
Crœsus fell a victim to the Persians in 546 B.C., so that his treasure
was no longer open to them. The total sum required was three hundred
talents, equal probably to about £115,000 sterling [or $575,000],--a
prodigious amount to be collected from the dispersed Grecian cities,
who acknowledged no common sovereign authority, and among whom the
proportion reasonable to ask from each was so difficult to determine
with satisfaction to all parties. At length, however, the money was
collected, and the Amphictyons were in a situation to make a contract for
the building of the temple. The Alcmæonidæ, who had been in exile ever
since the third and final acquisition of power by Pisistratus, took the
contract; and in executing it, they not only performed the work in the
best manner, but even went much beyond the terms stipulated; employing
Parian marble for the frontage, where the material prescribed to them
was coarse stone. As was before remarked in the case of Pisistratus when
he was in banishment, we are surprised to find exiles whose property had
been confiscated so amply furnished with money--unless we are to suppose
that Clisthenes the Alcmæonid, grandson of the Sicyonian Clisthenes,
inherited through his mother wealth independent of Attica, and deposited
it in the temple of the Samian Hera.
[Sidenote: [514-510 B.C.]]
To the Delphians, especially, the rebuilding of their temple on so
superior a scale was the most essential of all services, and their
gratitude towards the Alcmæonidæ was proportionally great. Partly
through such a feeling, partly through pecuniary presents, Clisthenes
was thus enabled to work the oracle for political purposes, and to call
forth the powerful arm of Sparta against Hippias. Whenever any Spartan
presented himself to consult the oracle, either on private or public
business, the answer of the priestess was always in one strain, “Athens
must be liberated.” The constant repetition of this mandate at length
extorted from the piety of the Lacedæmonians a reluctant compliance.
Reverence for the god overcame their strong feeling of friendship towards
the Pisistratidæ, and Anchimolius son of Aster was despatched by sea to
Athens, at the head of a Spartan force, to expel them. On landing at
Phalerum, however, he found them already forewarned and prepared, as
well as farther strengthened by one thousand horse specially demanded
from their allies in Thessaly. Upon the plain of Phalerum, this latter
force was found peculiarly effective, so that the division of Anchimolius
was driven back to their ships with great loss and he himself slain.
The defeated armament had probably been small, and its repulse only
provoked the Lacedæmonians to send a larger, under the command of their
king Cleomenes in person, who on this occasion marched into Attica by
land. On reaching the plain of Athens, he was assailed by the Thessalian
horse, but repelled them in so gallant a style, that they at once rode
off and returned to their native country; abandoning their allies with
a faithlessness not unfrequent in the Thessalian character. Cleomenes
marched on to Athens without further resistance, and found himself,
together with the Alcmæonids and the malcontent Athenians generally, in
possession of the town. At that time there was no fortification except
around the Acropolis, into which Hippias retired with his mercenaries
and the citizens most faithful to him; having taken care to provision
it well beforehand, so that it was not less secure against famine than
against assault. He might have defied the besieging force, which was
noway prepared for a long blockade; but, not altogether confiding in his
position, he tried to send his children by stealth out of the country;
and in this proceeding the children were taken prisoners. To procure
their restoration, Hippias consented to all that was demanded of him, and
withdrew from Attica to Sigeum in the Troad within the space of five days.
Thus fell the Pisistratid dynasty in 510 B.C., fifty years after the
first usurpation of its founder. It was put down through the aid of
foreigners, and those foreigners, too, wishing well to it in their
hearts, though hostile from a mistaken feeling of divine injunction.
Yet both the circumstances of its fall, and the course of events which
followed, conspire to show that it possessed few attached friends in
the country, and that the expulsion of Hippias was welcomed unanimously
by the vast majority of Athenians. His family and chief partisans would
accompany him into exile,--probably as a matter of course, without
requiring any formal sentence of condemnation; and an altar was erected
in the Acropolis, with a column hard by, commemorating both the past
iniquity of the dethroned dynasty, and the names of all its members.
[Sidenote: [510-507 B.C.]]
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 Cleomenes 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 that the Pisistratidæ 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, Clisthenes the Alcmæonid, 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, Clisthenes 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.” His partnership with the people gave
birth to the Athenian democracy: it was a real and important revolution.
GROTE’S ESTIMATE OF CLISTHENES THE REFORMER
[Sidenote: [507 B.C.]]
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
Piræus, where emigrants would commonly establish themselves. Clisthenes
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, Clisthenes 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 Clisthenean 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.
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.
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:
Clisthenes, 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, deriving their names from the four sons of Ion--just
as his grandfather, the Sicyonian Clisthenes, hating the Dorians, had
degraded and nicknamed the three Dorian tribes at Sicyon. Such is the
representation of Herodotus, who seems himself to have entertained some
contempt for the Ionians, and therefore to have suspected a similar
feeling where it had no real existence. But the scope of Clisthenes 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.
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. Clisthenes 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.
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; 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 factions in the same
city, each with its own separate organisation. It was only by slow
degrees that the plebs gained ground.
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. But the reform of Clisthenes 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, numerically, locally, and politically equal. It is, however, to be
remembered, that while the four Ionic tribes were abolished, the gentes
and phratries which compose them were left untouched, and continued to
subsist as family and religious associations, though carrying with them
no political privilege.
The ten newly created tribes, arranged in an established order of
precedence, were called: Erechtheis, Ægeis, Pandionis, Leontis,
Acamantis, Œneis, Cecropis, Hippothoöntis, Æantis, Antiochis--names
borrowed chiefly from the respected heroes of Attic legend. 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.
There is another point, however, which is at once more certain, and more
important to notice. The demes which Clisthenes 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
neighbourhood will appear to have been more especially necessary, when
we recollect that the quarrels of the Paralii, the Diacrii, the Pedieis,
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. Clisthenes distributed
the city (or found it already distributed) into several demes, and those
demes among several tribes; while Piræus and Phalerum, 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. 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
honour of its eponymous hero, administered by members of its own choice;
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.
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 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. So
great was the local administrative power, however, of these demes, that
they are described as the substitute, under the Clisthenean system, for
the naucraries under the Solonian and anti-Solonian. The trittyes and
naucraries, though nominally preserved, and the latter (as some affirm)
augmented in number from forty-eight to fifty, appear henceforward as of
little public importance.
Clisthenes preserved, but at the same time modified and expanded, all the
main features of Solon’s political constitution; the public assembly,
or ecclesia,--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 ecclesia. The full value
must now have been felt of possessing such pre-existing institutions to
build upon, at a moment of perplexity and dissension. But the Clisthenean
ecclesia 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
Clisthenean constitution, the polemarch still retained a joint right
of command along with them--as we are told at the battle of Marathon,
where Callimachus the polemarch not only enjoyed an equal vote in the
council of war along with the ten strategi, but even occupied the post
of honour on the right wing. The ten generals, annually changed, are
thus (like the ten tribes) a fruit of the Clisthenean 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 dicasteries or numerous jury-courts, on the
other. We may be very sure that these popular dicasteries had not been
permitted to meet or to act under the despotism of the Pisistratidæ, 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 ecclesia. 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 Clisthenes, doubtless carried the people into direct
action as jurors in the aggregate heliæa, not less than as voters in the
ecclesia; 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 panels, for trying particular causes, became gradually
more frequent and more systematised: until at length, in the time of
Pericles, it was made to carry a small pay, and stood out as one of the
most prominent features of Athenian life.
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. From this time forward, the senate of Five Hundred steps far
beyond its original duty of preparing matters for the discussion of the
ecclesia: 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.
During those later times known to us through the great orators, the
ecclesia, 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 strategi had also the power of convoking it by
their own authority. How often the ancient ecclesia had been convoked
during the interval between Solon and Pisistratus, we cannot exactly
say--probably but seldom during the year. But under the Pisistratidæ,
its convocation had dwindled down into an inoperative formality; and the
re-establishment of it by Clisthenes, 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 ecclesia 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 familiarised 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 specialties. 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 Pisistratidæ, but still more by the fact that the
opposing leader, Clisthenes, 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 Pisistratus. 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 ecclesia 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.
But it was not only the people formally installed in their ecclesia,
who received from Clisthenes the real attributes of sovereignty; it
was by him also that the people were first called into direct action
as dicasts, or jurors. 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
dicasteries, in the elaborate forms in which they existed from Pericles
downward, were introduced all at once by Clisthenes, 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 Clisthenes, 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 panels 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. 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. We 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
Clisthenes, 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
Pericles 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
Callimachus the polemarch not only commanded along with the strategi, but
enjoyed a sort of pre-eminence over them: nor had it been done during the
year after the battle of Marathon, in which Aristides was archon--for
the magisterial decisions of Aristides formed one of the principal
foundations of his honourable surname, the Just.
With this question, as to the comparative extent of judicial power vested
by Clisthenes in the popular dicastery 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
Pericles, 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 docimasy, 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 dicastery, 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 equalised 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. 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 strategi, 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 dicasts or to the ten elected strategi:
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 docimasy
excluded from the office men of notoriously discreditable life, even
after they might have drawn the successful lot. Pericles, though chosen
strategus, 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 it
was doubtless a source of importance, but it imposed troublesome labour,
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 docimasy
before, and accountability after, office. This was the conclusion--in
our opinion a mistaken conclusion, and such as would find no favour
at present--to which the democrats of Athens were conducted by their
strenuous desire to equalise 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.
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 that the
oligarchical, but high-principled Aristides, 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 equalised
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
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, strategi, and
all functionaries, first began to be chosen from all Athenians without
any difference of legal eligibility. No mention is made of the lot in
this important statement of Plutarch, which appears in every way worthy
of credit, and which teaches us that, down to the invasion of Xerxes 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 thetic
class excluded), but also the archons had hitherto been elected by the
citizens--not taken by lot.
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 Clisthenes in his
constitution retained it for political purposes also, in part at least:
he recognised the exclusion of the great mass of the citizens from all
individual offices--such as the archon, the strategus, etc. In his time,
probably, no complaints were raised on the subject. His constitution
gave to the collective bodies--senate, ecclesia, and heliæa, or
dicastery--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.[17]
The choice of the strategi remained ever afterwards upon the footing on
which Aristides thus placed it. 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
Clisthenes. His reform, though highly democratical, stopped short of the
mature democracy which prevailed from Pericles to Demosthenes, in three
ways especially, among various others; and it is therefore sometimes
considered by the later writers as an aristocratical constitution: (1)
It still recognised the archons as judges to a considerable extent, and
the third archon, or polemarch, as joint military commander along with
the strategi. (2) It retained them as elected annually by the body of
citizens, not as chosen by lot. (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, Clisthenes 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 Aristides, assuredly
not a rich man, became archon.
We are also inclined to believe that the senate of Five Hundred, as
constituted by Clisthenes, 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-democratised 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 further difference between the constitution of Solon and that of
Clisthenes 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 Pisistratidæ, the Areopagites
collectively must have been both hostile and odious to Clisthenes 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 Clisthenean 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 Clisthenes 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. We
have already remarked that the archons, during the intermediate time
(about 509-477 B.C.), were all elected by the ecclesia, 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 Pericles and
Ephialtes, in times when portions of the Clisthenean constitution had
come to be discredited as too much imbued with oligarchy.
One other remarkable institution, distinctly ascribed to Clisthenes, yet
remains to be noticed--the Ostracism. It is hardly too much to say that,
without this protective process, none of the other institutions would
have reached maturity.
OSTRACISM
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; and so it was vividly felt to be, when,
about ninety years after Clisthenes, the conspiracy between Nicias and
Alcibiades fixed it upon Hyperbolus. The two former had both recommended
the taking of an ostracising 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, “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.
We 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, much sharper than
the ostracism, such as the assassination of Cimon, as directed by the
Pisistratidæ. 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 Clisthenes, immediately after the expulsion
of the Pisistratidæ, 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 Megacles,
Lycurgus, and Pisistratus, put down after a time by the superior force
and alliances of the latter. And though Clisthenes, the son of Megacles,
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 (Aristides is reported to have said,
in the height and peril of his parliamentary struggle with Themistocles),
they would cast both Themistocles and me into the barathrum.” And whoever
reads the sad narrative of the Corcyræan sedition, in the third book
of Thucydides, together with the reflections of the historian upon it,
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.
Against this chance of internal assailants Clisthenes had to protect
the democratical constitution--first, by throwing impediments in their
way and rendering it difficult for them to procure the requisite
support; next, by eliminating them before any violent projects were
ripe for execution. To do either the one or the other, it was necessary
to provide such a constitution as would not only conciliate the good
will, but kindle the passionate attachment of the mass of citizens,
insomuch that not even any considerable minority should be deliberately
inclined to alter it by force. It was necessary to create in the
multitude, and through them to force upon the leading ambitious men,
that rare and difficult sentiment which we may term a constitutional
morality; a paramount reverence for the forms of the constitution,
enforcing obedience to the authorities acting under and within those
forms, yet combined with the habit of open speech, of action subject
only to definite legal control, and unrestrained censure of those very
authorities as to all their public acts--combined too with a perfect
confidence in the bosom of every citizen, amidst the bitterness of party
contest, that the forms of the constitution will be not less sacred in
the eyes of his opponents than in his own. This coexistence of freedom
and self-imposed restraint--of obedience to authority with unmeasured
censure of the persons exercising it--may be found in the aristocracy of
England (since about 1688) as well as in the democracy of the American
United States: and because we are familiar with it, we are apt to
suppose it a natural sentiment; though there seem to be few sentiments
more difficult to establish and diffuse among a community, judging by
the experience of history. We may see how imperfectly it exists at this
day in the Swiss cantons; and the many violences of the first French
Revolution illustrate, among various other lessons, the fatal effects
arising from its absence, even among a people high in the scale of
intelligence. Yet the diffusion of such constitutional morality, not
merely among the majority of any community, but throughout the whole, is
the indispensable condition of a government at once free and peaceable;
since even any powerful and obstinate minority may render the working
of free institutions impracticable, without being strong enough to
conquer ascendency for themselves. Nothing less than unanimity, or so
overwhelming a majority as to be tantamount to unanimity, on the cardinal
point of respecting constitutional forms, even by those who do not
wholly approve of them, can render the excitement of political passion
bloodless, and yet expose all the authorities in the state to the full
license of pacific criticism.
At the epoch of Clisthenes, which by a remarkable coincidence is the same
as that of the _regifugium_ at Rome, such constitutional morality, if it
existed anywhere else, had certainly no place at Athens; and the first
creation of it in any particular society must be esteemed an interesting
historical fact. By the spirit of his reforms,--equal, popular, and
comprehensive, far beyond the previous experience of Athenians,--he
secured the hearty attachment of the body of citizens; but from the
first generation of leading men, under the nascent democracy, and with
such precedents as they had to look back upon, no self-imposed limits to
ambition could be expected: and the problem required was to eliminate
beforehand any one about to transgress these limits, so as to escape the
necessity of putting him down afterwards, with all that bloodshed and
reaction, in the midst of which the free working of the constitution
would be suspended at least, if not irrevocably extinguished. To acquire
such influence as would render him dangerous under democratical forms,
a man must stand in evidence before the public, so as to afford some
reasonable means of judging of his character and purposes; and the
security which Clisthenes provided was, to call in the positive judgment
of the citizens respecting his future promise purely and simply, so
that they might not remain too long neutral between two formidable
political rivals--pursuant in a certain way to the Solonian proclamation
against neutrality in a sedition, as we have already remarked in a
former chapter. He incorporated in the constitution itself the principle
of _privilegium_ (to employ the Roman phrase, which signifies, not
a peculiar favour granted to any one, but a peculiar inconvenience
imposed), yet only under circumstances solemn and well defined, with
full notice and discussion beforehand, and by the positive secret vote
of a large proportion of the citizens. “No law shall be made against
any single citizen, without the same being made against all Athenian
citizens; unless it shall so seem good to six thousand citizens voting
secretly.” Such was that general principle of the constitution, under
which the ostracism was a particular case. Before the vote of ostracism
could be taken, a case was to be made out in the senate and the public
assembly to justify it. In the sixth prytany of the year, these two
bodies debated and determined whether the state of the republic was
menacing enough to call for such an exceptional measure. If they decided
in the affirmative, a day was named, the agora was railed round, with ten
entrances left for the citizens of each tribe, and ten separate casks
or vessels for depositing the suffrages, which consisted of a shell, or
a potsherd, with the name of the person written on it whom each citizen
designed to banish. At the end of the day, the number of votes was summed
up, and if six thousand votes were found to have been given against any
one person, that person was ostracised; if not, the ceremony ended in
nothing. Ten days were allowed to him for settling his affairs, after
which he was required to depart from Attica for ten years, but retained
his property, and suffered no other penalty.
It was not the maxim at Athens to escape the errors of the people, by
calling in the different errors, and the sinister interest besides,
of an extra-popular or privileged few; nor was any third course open,
since the principles of representative government were not understood,
nor indeed conveniently applicable to very small communities. Beyond
the judgment of the people--so the Athenians felt--there was no appeal;
and their grand study was to surround the delivery of that judgment
with the best securities for rectitude and the best preservatives
against haste, passion, or private corruption. Whatever measure of
good government could not be obtained in that way, could not, in their
opinion, be obtained at all. We shall illustrate the Athenian proceedings
on this head more fully when we come to speak of the working of their
mature democracy: meanwhile, in respect to this grand protection of the
nascent democracy,--the vote of ostracism,--it will be found that the
securities devised by Clisthenes, for making the sentence effectual
against the really dangerous man, and against no one else, display not
less foresight than patriotism. The main object was, to render the voting
an expression of deliberate public feeling, as distinguished from mere
factious antipathy: the large minimum of votes required, one-fourth
of the entire citizen population, went far to insure this effect, the
more so, since each vote, taken as it was in a secret manner, counted
unequivocally for the expression of a genuine and independent sentiment,
and could neither be coerced nor bought. Then again, Clisthenes did not
permit the process of ostracising to be opened against any one citizen
exclusively. If opened at all, every one without exception was exposed
to the sentence; so that the friends of Themistocles could not invoke it
against Aristides, nor those of the latter against the former, without
exposing their own leader to the same chance of exile. It was not likely
to be invoked at all, therefore, until exasperation had proceeded so far
as to render both parties insensible to this chance--the precise index
of that growing internecine hostility, which the ostracism prevented
from coming to a head. Nor could it even then be ratified, unless a case
was shown to convince the more neutral portion of the senate and the
ecclesia: moreover, after all, the ecclesia did not itself ostracise,
but a future day was named, and the whole body of the citizens were
solemnly invited to vote. It was in this way that security was taken not
only for making the ostracism effectual in protecting the constitution,
but to hinder it from being employed for any other purpose. And we must
recollect that it exercised its tutelary influence, not merely on those
occasions when it was actually employed, but by the mere knowledge that
it might be employed, and by the restraining effect which that knowledge
produced on the conduct of the great men. Again, the ostracism, though
essentially of an exceptional nature, was yet an exception sanctified
and limited by the constitution itself; so that the citizen, in giving
his ostracising vote, did not in any way depart from the constitution or
lose his reverence for it. The issue placed before him--“Is there any
man whom you think vitally dangerous to the State? if so, whom?”--though
vague, was yet raised directly and legally. Had there been no ostracism,
it might probably have been raised both indirectly and illegally, on the
occasion of some special imputed crime of a suspected political leader,
when accused before a court of justice.
Care was taken to divest the ostracism of all painful consequence except
what was inseparable from exile; and this is not one of the least proofs
of the wisdom with which it was devised. Most certainly, it never
deprived the public of candidates for political influence: and when we
consider the small amount of individual evil which it inflicted,--evil
too diminished, in the cases of Cimon and Aristides, by a reactionary
sentiment which augmented their subsequent popularity after return,--two
remarks will be quite sufficient to offer in the way of justification.
First, it completely produced its intended effect; for the democracy
grew up from infancy to manhood without a single attempt to overthrow it
by force--a result, upon which no reflecting contemporary of Clisthenes
could have ventured to calculate. Next, through such tranquil working
of the democratical forms, a constitutional morality quite sufficiently
complete was produced among the leading Athenians, to enable the people
after a certain time to dispense with that exceptional security which
the ostracism offered. To the nascent democracy, it was absolutely
indispensable; to the growing yet militant democracy, it was salutary;
but the full-grown democracy both could and did stand without it. The
ostracism passed upon Hyperbolus, about ninety years after Clisthenes,
was the last occasion of its employment. And even this can hardly be
considered as a serious instance: it was a trick concerted between
two distinguished Athenians (Nicias and Alcibiades), to turn to their
own political account a process already coming to be antiquated. Nor
would such a manœuvre have been possible, if the contemporary Athenian
citizens had been penetrated with the same serious feeling of the value
of ostracism as a safeguard of democracy, as had been once entertained
by their fathers and grandfathers. Between Clisthenes and Hyperbolus,
we hear of about ten different persons as having been banished by
ostracism. First of all, Hipparchus of the deme Cholargus, the son of
Charmus, a relative of the recently expelled Pisistratid despots; then
Aristides, Themistocles, Cimon, and Thucydides son of Melesias, all
of them renowned political leaders; also Alcibiades and Megacles (the
paternal and maternal grandfathers of the distinguished Alcibiades),
and Callias, belonging to another eminent family at Athens; lastly,
Damon, the preceptor of Pericles in poetry and music, and eminent for
his acquisitions in philosophy. In this last case comes out the vulgar
side of humanity, aristocratical as well as democratical; for with both,
the process of philosophy and the persons of philosophers are wont to
be alike unpopular. Even Clisthenes himself is said to be ostracised
under his own law, and Xanthippus; but both upon authority too weak to
trust. Miltiades was not ostracised at all, but tried and punished for
misconduct in his command.
We should hardly have said so much about this memorable and peculiar
institution of Clisthenes, if the erroneous accusations against the
Athenian democracy--of envy, injustice, and ill-treatment of their
superior men, had not been greatly founded upon it, and if such
criticisms had not passed from ancient times to modern with little
examination. In monarchical governments, a pretender to the throne,
numbering a certain amount of supporters, is, as a matter of course,
excluded from the country. No man treats this as any extravagant
injustice, yet it is the parallel of the ostracism, with a stronger
case in favour of the latter, inasmuch as the change from one regal
dynasty to another does not of necessity overthrow all the collateral
institutions and securities of the country. Plutarch has affirmed that
the ostracism arose from the envy and jealousy inherent in a democracy,
and not from justifiable fears--an observation often repeated, yet not
the less demonstrably untrue. Not merely because ostracism so worked as
often to increase the influence of that political leader whose rival it
removed, but still more, because, if the fact had been as Plutarch says,
this institution would have continued as long as the democracy; whereas
it finished with the banishment of Hyperbolus, at a period when the
government was more decisively democratical than it had been in the time
of Clisthenes.
It was, in truth, a product altogether of fear and insecurity, on
the part both of the democracy and its best friends--fear perfectly
well-grounded, and only appearing needless because the precautions
taken prevented attack. So soon as the diffusion of a constitutional
morality had placed the mass of the citizens above all serious fear of
an aggressive usurper the ostracism was discontinued. And doubtless
the feeling, that it might safely be dispensed with, must have been
strengthened by the long ascendancy of Pericles, by the spectacle of the
greatest statesman whom Athens ever produced, acting steadily within
the limits of the constitution; as well as by the ill-success of his
two opponents, Cimon and Thucydides,--aided by numerous partisans and
by the great comic writers, at a period when comedy was a power in the
state such as it has never been before or since,--in their attempts to
get him ostracised. They succeeded in fanning up the ordinary antipathy
of the citizens towards philosophers, so far as to procure the ostracism
of his friend and teacher Damon: but Pericles himself, to repeat the
complaint of his bitter enemy, the comic poet Cratinus, “was out of the
reach of the oyster-shell.” If Pericles was not conceived to be dangerous
to the constitution, none of his successors were at all likely to be so
regarded. Damon and Hyperbolus were the two last persons ostracised: both
of them were cases, and the only cases, of an unequivocal abuse of the
institution, because, whatever the grounds of displeasure against them
may have been, it is impossible to conceive either of them as menacing
to the state--whereas all the other known sufferers were men of such
position and power, that the six or eight thousand citizens who inscribed
each name on the shell, or at least a large proportion of them, may well
have done so under the most conscientious belief that they were guarding
the constitution against real danger. Such a change in the character of
the persons ostracised plainly evinces that the ostracism had become
dissevered from that genuine patriotic prudence which originally rendered
it both legitimate and popular. It had served for two generations an
inestimable tutelary purpose,--it lived to be twice dishonoured,--and
then passed, by universal acquiescence, into matter of history.
[Illustration: STATUE OF MINERVA]
A process analogous to the ostracism subsisted at Argos, at Syracuse, and
in some other Grecian democracies. Aristotle states that it was abused
for factious purposes: and at Syracuse, where it was introduced after
the expulsion of the Gelonian dynasty, Diodorus affirms that it was so
unjustly and profusely applied, as to deter persons of wealth and station
from taking any part in public affairs; for which reason it was speedily
discontinued. We have no particulars to enable us to appreciate this
general statement. But we cannot safely infer that because the ostracism
worked on the whole well at Athens, it must necessarily have worked well
in other states--the more so, as we do not know whether it was surrounded
with the same precautionary formalities, nor whether it even required the
same large minimum of votes to make it effective. This latter guarantee,
so valuable in regard to an institution essentially easy to abuse, is not
noticed by Diodorus in his brief account of the petalism--so the process
was denominated at Syracuse.
THE DEMOCRACY ESTABLISHED
Such was the first Athenian democracy, engendered as well by the reaction
against Hippias and his dynasty as by the memorable partnership, whether
spontaneous or compulsory, between Clisthenes and the unfranchised
multitude. It is to be distinguished, both from the mitigated oligarchy
established by Solon before, and from the full-grown and symmetrical
democracy which prevailed afterwards from the beginning of the
Peloponnesian War towards the close of the career of Pericles. It was,
indeed, a striking revolution, impressed upon the citizen not less by
the sentiments to which it appealed than by the visible change which
it made in political and social life. He saw himself marshalled in the
ranks of hoplites, alongside of new companions in arms; he was enrolled
in a new register, and his property in a new schedule, in his deme and
by his demarch, an officer before unknown; he found the year distributed
afresh, for all legal purposes, into ten parts bearing the name of
prytanies, each marked by a solemn and free-spoken ecclesia, at which he
had a right to be present; that ecclesia was convoked and presided by
senators called prytanes, members of a senate novel both as to number
and distribution; his political duties were now performed as member of a
tribe, designated by a name not before pronounced in common Attic life,
connected with one of ten heroes whose statues he now for the first time
saw in the agora, and associating him with fellow-tribesmen from all
parts of Attica. All these and many others were sensible novelties, felt
in the daily proceedings of the citizen. But the great novelty of all was
the authentic recognition of the ten new tribes as a sovereign demos,
or people, apart from all specialties of phratric or gentile origin,
with free speech and equal law; retaining no distinction except the
four classes of the Solonian property-schedule with their gradations of
eligibility. To a considerable proportion of citizens this great novelty
was still further endeared by the fact that it had raised them out of
the degraded position of metics and slaves; and to the large majority
of all the citizens, it furnished a splendid political idea, profoundly
impressive to the Greek mind, capable of calling forth the most ardent
attachment as well as the most devoted sense of active obligation
and obedience. We have now to see how their newly-created patriotism
manifested itself.
Clisthenes and his new constitution carried with them so completely the
popular favour, that Isagoras had no other way of opposing it except by
calling in the interference of Cleomenes and the Lacedæmonians. Cleomenes
listened the more readily to this call, as he was reported to have
been on an intimate footing with the wife of Isagoras. He prepared to
come to Athens; but his first aim was to deprive the democracy of its
great leader Clisthenes, who, as belonging to the Alcmæonid family, was
supposed to be tainted with the inherited sin of his great-grandfather
Megacles, the destroyer of the usurper Cylon. Cleomenes sent a herald to
Athens, demanding the expulsion “of the accursed,”--so this family were
called by their enemies, and so they continued to be called eighty years
afterwards, when the same manœuvre was practised by the Lacedæmonians
of that day against Pericles. This requisition had been recommended
by Isagoras, and was so well-timed that Clisthenes, not venturing to
disobey it, retired voluntarily, so that Cleomenes, though arriving at
Athens only with a small force, found himself master of the city. At
the instigation of Isagoras, he sent into exile seven hundred families,
selected from the chief partisans of Clisthenes: his next attempt was to
dissolve the new senate of Five Hundred and place the whole government
in the hands of three hundred adherents of the chief whose cause he
espoused. But now was seen the spirit infused into the people by their
new constitution. At the time of the first usurpation of Pisistratus, the
senate of that day had not only not resisted, but even lent themselves to
the scheme. But the new senate of Clisthenes resolutely refused to submit
to dissolution, and the citizens manifested themselves in a way at once
so hostile and so determined, that Cleomenes and Isagoras were altogether
baffled. They were compelled to retire into the Acropolis and stand upon
the defensive; and this symptom of weakness was the signal for a general
rising of the Athenians, who besieged the Spartan king on the holy rock.
He had evidently come without any expectation of finding, or any means of
overpowering, resistance; for at the end of two days his provisions were
exhausted, and he was forced to capitulate. He and his Lacedæmonians, as
well as Isagoras, were allowed to retire to Sparta; but the Athenians
of the party captured along with him were imprisoned, condemned, and
executed by the people.
Clisthenes, with the seven hundred exiled families, was immediately
recalled, and his new constitution materially strengthened by this first
success. Yet the prospect of renewed Spartan attack was sufficiently
serious to induce him to send envoys to Artaphernes, the Persian satrap
at Sardis, soliciting the admission of Athens into the Persian alliance:
he probably feared the intrigues of the expelled Hippias in the same
quarter. Artaphernes, having first informed himself who the Athenians
were, and where they dwelt, replied that, if they chose to send earth
and water to the king of Persia, they might be received as allies, but
upon no other condition. Such were the feelings of alarm under which the
envoys had quitted Athens, that they went the length of promising this
unqualified token of submission. But their countrymen, on their return,
disavowed them with scorn and indignation.
TROUBLE WITH THEBES
It was at this time that the first connection began between Athens and
the little Bœotian town of Platæa, situated on the northern slope of
the range of Cithæron, between that mountain and the river Asopus, on
the road from Athens to Thebes; and it is upon this first occasion that
we become acquainted with the Bœotians and their polities. The Bœotian
federation has already been briefly described, as composed of some twelve
or thirteen autonomous towns under the headship of Thebes, which was,
or professed to have been, their mother-city. Platæa had been, so the
Thebans affirmed, their latest foundation; it was ill-used by them, and
discontented with the alliance. Accordingly, as Cleomenes was on his
way back from Athens, the Platæans took the opportunity of addressing
themselves to him, craved the protection of Sparta against Thebes, and
surrendered their town and territory without reserve. The Spartan king,
having no motive to undertake a trust which promised nothing but trouble,
advised them to solicit the protection of Athens, as nearer and more
accessible for them in case of need. He foresaw that this would embroil
the Athenians with Bœotia; and such anticipation was in fact his chief
motive for giving the advice, which the Platæans followed.
[Sidenote: [506 B.C.]]
Selecting an occasion of public sacrifice at Athens, they despatched
thither envoys, who sat down as suppliants at the altar, surrendered
their town to Athens, and implored protection against Thebes. Such an
appeal was not to be resisted, and protection was promised; it was soon
needed, for the Thebans invaded the Platæan territory, and an Athenian
force marched to defend it. Battle was about to be joined, when the
Corinthians interposed with their mediation, which was accepted by both
parties. They decided altogether in favour of Platæa, pronouncing that
the Thebans had no right to employ force against any seceding member of
the Bœotian federation. But the Thebans, finding the decision against
them, refused to abide by it, and, attacking the Athenians on their
return, sustained a complete defeat: the latter avenged this breach of
faith by joining to Platæa the portion of Theban territory south of the
Asopus, and making that river the limit between the two. By such success,
however, the Athenians gained nothing, except the enmity of Bœotia, as
Cleomenes had foreseen. Their alliance with Platæa, long continued, and
presenting in the course of this history several incidents touching
to our sympathies, will be found, if we except one splendid occasion,
productive only of burden to the one party, yet insufficient as a
protection to the other.
Meanwhile Cleomenes had returned to Sparta full of resentment against the
Athenians, and resolved on punishing them, as well as on establishing
his friend Isagoras as despot over them. Having been taught, however,
by humiliating experience, that this was no easy achievement, he would
not make the attempt, without having assembled a considerable force;
he summoned allies from all the various states of the Peloponnesus,
yet without venturing to inform them what he was about to undertake.
He at the same time concerted measures with the Bœotians, and with the
Chalcidians of Eubœa, for a simultaneous invasion of Attica on all sides.
It appears that he had greater confidence in their hostile dispositions
towards Athens than in those of the Peloponnesians; he was not afraid to
acquaint them with his design, and probably the Bœotians were incensed
with the recent interference of Athens in the affair of Platæa. As soon
as these preparations were completed, the two kings of Sparta, Cleomenes
and Demaratus, put themselves at the head of the united Peloponnesian
force, marched into Attica, and advanced as far as Eleusis on the way
to Athens. But when the allies came to know the purpose for which they
were to be employed, a spirit of dissatisfaction manifested itself
among them. They had no unfriendly sentiment towards Athens; and the
Corinthians especially, favourably disposed rather than otherwise towards
that city, resolved to proceed no further, withdrew their contingent from
the camp, and returned home. At the same time, king Demaratus, either
sharing in the general dissatisfaction, or moved by some grudge against
his colleague which had not before manifested itself, renounced the
undertaking also. And these two examples, operating upon the pre-existing
sentiment of the allies generally, caused the whole camp to break up and
return home without striking a blow.
We may here remark that this is the first instance known in which
Sparta appears in act as recognised head of an obligatory Peloponnesian
alliance, summoning contingents from the cities to be placed under the
command of her king. Her headship, previously recognised in theory,
passes now into act, but in an unsatisfactory manner, so as to prove the
necessity of precaution and concert beforehand, which will be found not
long wanting.
Pursuant to the scheme concerted, the Bœotians and Chalcidians attacked
Attica at the same time that Cleomenes entered it. The former seized Œnoe
and Hysiæ, the frontier demes of Attica on the side towards Platæa, while
the latter assailed the northeastern frontier, which faces Eubœa. Invaded
on three sides, the Athenians were in serious danger, and were compelled
to concentrate all their forces at Eleusis against Cleomenes, leaving the
Bœotians and Chalcidians unopposed. But the unexpected breaking up of the
invading army from the Peloponnesus proved their rescue, and enabled them
to turn the whole of their attention to the other frontier. They marched
into Bœotia to the strait called Euripus, which separates it from Eubœa,
intending to prevent the junction of the Bœotians and Chalcidians, and
to attack the latter first apart. But the arrival of the Bœotians caused
an alteration of their scheme; they attacked the Bœotians first, and
gained a victory of the most complete character, killing a large number,
and capturing seven hundred prisoners. On the very same day they crossed
over to Eubœa, attacked the Chalcidians, and gained another victory so
decisive that it at once terminated the war. Many Chalcidians were taken,
as well as Bœotians, and conveyed in chains to Athens, where after a
certain detention they were at last ransomed for two minæ per man; and
the tenth of the sum thus raised was employed in the fabrication of a
chariot and four horses in bronze, which was placed in the Acropolis to
commemorate the victory. Herodotus saw this trophy when he was at Athens.
He saw too, what was a still more speaking trophy, the actual chains in
which the prisoners had been fettered, exhibiting in their appearance the
damage undergone when the Acropolis was burnt by Xerxes: an inscription
of four lines described the offerings and recorded the victory out of
which they had sprung.
Another consequence of some moment arose out of this victory. The
Athenians planted a body of four thousand of their citizens as cleruchs
(lot-holders) or settlers upon the lands of the wealthy Chalcidian
oligarchy called the _hippobotæ_--proprietors probably in the fertile
plain of Lelantum, between Chalcis and Eretria. This is a system which
we shall find hereafter extensively followed out by the Athenians in the
days of their power; partly with the view of providing for their poorer
citizens, partly to serve as garrison among a population either hostile
or of doubtful fidelity. These Attic cleruchs (we can find no other name
by which to speak of them) did not lose their birthright as Athenian
citizens: they were not colonists in the Grecian sense, and they are
known by a totally different name, but they corresponded very nearly to
the colonies formally planted out on the conquered lands by Rome. The
increase of the poorer population was always more or less painfully felt
in every Grecian city. For though the aggregate population never seems
to have increased very fast, yet the multiplication of children in poor
families caused the subdivision of the smaller lots of land, until at
last they became insufficient for a maintenance; and the persons thus
impoverished found it difficult to obtain subsistence in other ways, more
especially as the labour for the richer classes was so much performed
by imported slaves. The numerous cleruchies sent out by Athens, of
which this to Eubœa was the first, arose in a great measure out of the
multiplication of the poorer population, which her extended power was
employed in providing for. Her subsequent proceedings with a view to the
same object will not be always found so justifiable as this now before
us, which grew naturally, according to the ideas of the time, out of her
success against the Chalcidians.
[Sidenote: [498-491 B.C.]]
The war between Athens, however, and Thebes with her Bœotian allies,
still continued, to the great and repeated disadvantage of the latter,
until at length the Thebans in despair sent to ask advice of the Delphian
oracle, and were directed to “solicit aid from those nearest to them.”
“How (they replied) are we to obey? Our nearest neighbours, of Tanagra,
Coronea, and Thespiæ, are now, and have been from the beginning, lending
us all the aid in their power.” An ingenious Theban, however, coming
to the relief of his perplexed fellow-citizens, dived into the depths
of legend and brought up a happy meaning. “Those nearest to us (he
said) are the inhabitants of Ægina: for Thebe (the eponym of Thebes)
and Ægina (the eponym of that island) were both sisters, daughters of
Asopus: let us send to crave assistance from the Æginetans.” If his
subtle interpretation (founded upon their descent from the same legendary
progenitors) did not at once convince all who heard it, at least no
one had any better to suggest; and envoys were at once sent to the
Æginetans, who, in reply to a petition founded on legendary claims, sent
to the help of the Thebans a reinforcement of legendary, but venerated,
auxiliaries--the Æacid heroes. We are left to suppose that their effigies
are here meant. It was in vain, however, that the glory and the supposed
presence of the Æacids, Telamon and Peleus, were introduced into the
Theban camp. Victory still continued on the side of Athens; and the
discouraged Thebans again sent to Ægina, restoring the heroes, and
praying for aid of a character more human and positive. Their request was
granted, and the Æginetans commenced war against Athens without even the
decent preliminary of a herald and declaration.
This remarkable embassy first brings us into acquaintance with the
Dorians of Ægina,--oligarchical, wealthy, commercial, and powerful
at sea, even in the earliest days; more analogous to Corinth than to
any of the other cities called Dorian. The hostility which they now
began without provocation against Athens,--repressed by Sparta at the
critical moment of the battle of Marathon, and hushed for a while by
the common dangers of the Persian invasion under Xerxes; then again
breaking out,--was appeased only with the conquest of the island about
twenty years after that event, and with the expulsion and destruction
of its inhabitants some years later. There had been indeed, according
to Herodotus, a feud of great antiquity between Athens and Ægina, of
which he gives the account in a singular narrative, blending together
religion, politics, exposition of ancient customs, etc.; but at the time
when the Thebans solicited aid from Ægina, the latter was at peace with
Athens. The Æginetans employed their fleet, powerful for that day, in
ravaging Phalerum and the maritime demes of Attica; nor had the Athenians
as yet any fleet to resist them. It is probable that the desired effect
was produced, of diverting a portion of the Athenian force from the war
against Bœotia, and thus partially relieving Thebes. But the war of
Athens against both of them continued for a considerable time, though we
have no information respecting its details.
Meanwhile the attention of Athens was called off from these combined
enemies by a more menacing cloud, which threatened to burst upon her from
the side of Sparta. Cleomenes and his countrymen, full of resentment
at the late inglorious desertion of Eleusis, were yet more incensed by
the discovery, which appears to have been then recently made, that the
injunctions of the Delphian priestess for the expulsion of Hippias from
Athens had been fraudulently procured. Moreover, Cleomenes, when shut
up in the Acropolis of Athens with Isagoras, had found there various
prophecies previously treasured up by the Pisistratidæ, many of which
foreshadowed events highly disastrous to Sparta. And while the recent
brilliant manifestations of courage, and repeated victories, on the
part of Athens, seemed to indicate that such prophecies might perhaps
be realised, Sparta had to reproach herself, that, from the foolish
and mischievous conduct of Cleomenes, she had undone the effect of her
previous aid against the Pisistratidæ, and thus lost that return of
gratitude which the Athenians would otherwise have testified. Under such
impressions, the Spartan authorities took the remarkable step of sending
for Hippias from his residence at Sigeum to the Peloponnesus, and of
summoning deputies from all their allies to meet him at Sparta.
The convocation thus summoned deserves notice as the commencement of a
new era in Grecian politics. The previous expedition of Cleomenes against
Attica presents to us the first known example of Spartan headship passing
from theory into act: that expedition miscarried because the allies,
though willing to follow, would not follow blindly, nor be made the
instruments of executing purposes repugnant to their feelings. Sparta had
now learned the necessity, in order to insure their hearty concurrence,
of letting them know what she contemplated, so as to ascertain at least
that she had no decided opposition to apprehend. Here, then, is the
third stage in the spontaneous movement of Greece towards a systematic
conjunction, however imperfect, of its many autonomous units. First
we have Spartan headship suggested in theory, from a concourse of
circumstances which attract to her the admiration of all Greece,--power,
unrivalled training, undisturbed antiquity, etc.; next, the theory passes
into act, yet rude and shapeless; lastly, the act becomes clothed with
formalities, and preceded by discussion and determination. The first
convocation of the allies at Sparta, for the purpose of having a common
object submitted to their consideration, may well be regarded as an
important event in Grecian political history. The proceedings at the
convocation are no less important, as an indication of the way in which
the Greeks of that day felt and acted, and must be borne in mind as a
contrast with times hereafter to be described.
Hippias having been presented to the assembled allies, the Spartans
expressed their sorrow for having dethroned him, their resentment
and alarm at the new born insolence of Athens, already tasted by her
immediate neighbours, and menacing to every state represented in the
convocation, and their anxiety to restore Hippias, not less as a
reparation for past wrong, than as a means, through his rule, of keeping
Athens low and dependent. But the proposition, though emanating from
Sparta, was listened to by the allies with one common sentiment of
repugnance. They had no sympathy for Hippias, no dislike, still less any
fear, of Athens, and a profound detestation of the character of a despot.
The spirit which had animated the armed contingents at Eleusis now
reappeared among the deputies at Sparta, and the Corinthians again took
the initiative. Their deputy Sosicles protested against the project in
the fiercest and most indignant strain: no language can be stronger than
that of the long harangue which Herodotus puts into his mouth, wherein
the bitter recollections prevalent at Corinth respecting Cypselus and
Periander are poured forth. “Surely, heaven and earth are about to change
places,--the fish are coming to dwell on dry land, and mankind going to
inhabit the sea,--when you, Spartans, propose to subvert the popular
governments, and to set up in the cities that wicked and bloody thing
called a Despot. First try what it is, for yourselves at Sparta, and then
force it upon others if you can: you have not tasted its calamities as
we have, and you take very good care to keep it away from yourselves.
We adjure you, by the common gods of Hellas,--plant not despots in her
cities: if you persist in a scheme so wicked, know that the Corinthians
will not second you.”
This animated appeal was received with a shout of approbation and
sympathy on the part of the allies. All with one accord united with
Sosicles in adjuring the Lacedæmonians “not to revolutionise any
Hellenic city.” No one listened to Hippias when he replied, warning the
Corinthians that the time would come, when they, more than any one else,
would dread and abhor the Athenian democracy, and wish the Pisistratidæ
back again. He knew well, says Herodotus, that this would be, for he
was better acquainted with the prophecies than any man. But no one then
believed him, and he was forced to take his departure back to Sigeum:
the Spartans not venturing to espouse his cause against the determined
sentiment of the allies.
That determined sentiment deserves notice, because it marks the
present period of the Hellenic mind; fifty years later it will be
found materially altered. Aversion to single-headed rule, and bitter
recollection of men like Cypselus and Periander are now the chords which
thrill in an assembly of Grecian deputies: the idea of a revolution,
implying thereby a great and comprehensive change, of which the party
using the word disapproves, consists in substituting a permanent One
in place of those periodical magistrates and assemblies which were the
common attribute of oligarchy and democracy: the antithesis between
these last two is as yet in the background, nor does there prevail
either fear of Athens or hatred of the Athenian democracy. But when we
turn to the period immediately before the Peloponnesian War, we find
the order of precedence between these two sentiments reversed. The
anti-monarchical feeling has not perished, but has been overlaid by other
and more recent political antipathies,--the antithesis between democracy
and oligarchy having become, not indeed the only sentiment, but the
uppermost sentiment, in the minds of Grecian politicians generally, and
the soul of active party movement. Moreover, a hatred of the most deadly
character has grown up against Athens and her democracy, especially in
the grandsons of those very Corinthians who now stand forward as her
sympathising friends. The remarkable change of feeling here mentioned is
nowhere so strikingly exhibited as when we contrast the address of the
Corinthian Sosicles, just narrated, with the speech of the Corinthian
envoys at Sparta, immediately antecedent to the Peloponnesian War, as
given to us in Thucydides. It will hereafter be fully explained by the
intermediate events, by the growth of Athenian power, and by the still
more miraculous development of Athenian energy.
[Sidenote: [494-490 B.C.]]
Such development, the fruit of the fresh-planted democracy as well as
the seed for its sustentation and aggrandisement, continued progressive
during the whole period just adverted to. But the first unexpected burst
of it, under the Clisthenean constitution, and after the expulsion of
Hippias, is described by Herodotus in terms too emphatic to be omitted.
After narrating the successive victories of the Athenians over both
Bœotians and Chalcidians, that historian proceeds: “Thus did the
Athenians grow in strength. And we may find proof, not merely in this
instance but everywhere else, how valuable a thing freedom is: since even
the Athenians, while under a despot, were not superior in war to any
of their surrounding neighbours, but, so soon as they got rid of their
despots, became by far the first of all. These things show that while
kept down by one man, they were slack and timid, like men working for a
master; but when they were liberated, every single man became eager in
exertions for his own benefit.” The same comparison reappears a short
time afterwards, where he tells us, that “the Athenians when free, felt
themselves a match for Sparta; but while kept down by any man under a
despotism, were feeble and apt for submission.”
Stronger expressions cannot be found to depict the rapid improvement
wrought in the Athenian people by their new democracy. Of course this
did not arise merely from suspension of previous cruelties, or better
laws, or better administration. These, indeed, were essential conditions,
but the active transforming cause here was the principle and system of
which such amendments formed the detail: the grand and new idea of the
sovereign people, composed of free and equal citizens,--or liberty and
equality, to use words which so profoundly moved the French nation half
a century ago. It was this comprehensive political idea which acted
with electric effect upon the Athenians, creating within them a host
of sentiments, motives, sympathies, and capacities to which they had
before been strangers. Democracy in Grecian antiquity possessed the
privilege, not only of kindling an earnest and unanimous attachment to
the constitution in the bosoms of the citizens, but also of creating an
energy of public and private action, such as could never be obtained
under an oligarchy, where the utmost that could be hoped for was a
passive acquiescence and obedience. Mr. Burke has remarked that the
mass of the people are generally very indifferent about theories of
government; but such indifference--although improvements in the practical
working of all governments tend to foster it--is hardly to be expected
among any people who exhibit decided mental activity and spirit on other
matters; and the reverse was unquestionably true, in the year 500 B.C.,
among the communities of ancient Greece. Theories of government were
there anything but a dead letter; they were connected with emotions of
the strongest as well as of the most opposite character. The theory of
a permanent ruling One, for example, was universally odious: that of
a ruling Few, though acquiesced in, was never positively attractive,
unless either where it was associated with the maintenance of peculiar
education and habits, as at Sparta, or where it presented itself as the
only antithesis to democracy, the latter having by peculiar circumstances
become an object of terror. But the theory of democracy was pre-eminently
seductive; creating in the mass of the citizens an intense positive
attachment, and disposing them to voluntary action and suffering on its
behalf, such as no coercion on the part of other governments could extort.
Herodotus, in his comparison of the three sorts of government, puts in
the front rank of the advantages of democracy, “its most splendid name
and promise,”--its power of enlisting the hearts of the citizens in
support of their constitution, and of providing for all a common bond
of union and fraternity. This is what even democracy did not always
do: but it was what no other government in Greece could do: a reason
alone sufficient to stamp it as the best government, and presenting the
greatest chance of beneficent results, for a Grecian community. Among
the Athenian citizens, certainly, it produced a strength and unanimity
of positive political sentiment, such as has rarely been seen in the
history of mankind, which excites our surprise and admiration the more
when we compare it with the apathy which had preceded,--and which is
even applied as the natural state of the public mind in Solon’s famous
proclamation against neutrality in a sedition. Because democracy happens
to be unpalatable to some modern readers, they have been accustomed to
look upon the sentiment here described only in its least honourable
manifestations,--in the caricatures of Aristophanes, or in the empty
commonplaces of rhetorical declaimers. But it is not in this way that the
force, the earnestness, or the binding value of democratical sentiment
at Athens is to be measured. We must listen to it as it comes from the
lips of Pericles, while he is strenuously enforcing upon the people those
active duties for which it both implanted the stimulus and supplied the
courage; or from the oligarchical Nicias in the harbour of Syracuse,
when he is endeavouring to revive the courage of his despairing troops
for one last death-struggle, and when he appeals to their democratical
patriotism as to the only flame yet alive and burning even in that moment
of agony. From the time of Clisthenes downward, the creation of this new
mighty impulse makes an entire revolution in the Athenian character. And
if the change still stood out in so prominent a manner before the eyes of
Herodotus, much more must it have been felt by the contemporaries among
whom it occurred.
The attachment of an Athenian citizen to his democratical constitution
comprised two distinct veins of sentiment: first, his rights, protection,
and advantages derived from it; next, his obligations of exertion and
sacrifice towards it and with reference to it. Neither of these two
veins of sentiment was ever wholly absent; but according as the one
or the other was present at different times in varying proportions,
the patriotism of the citizen was a very different feeling. That which
Herodotus remarks is, the extraordinary efforts of heart and hand which
the Athenians suddenly displayed,--the efficacy of the active sentiment
throughout the bulk of the citizens; and we shall observe even more
memorable evidences of the same phenomenon in tracing down the history
from Clisthenes to the end of the Peloponnesian War: we shall trace a
series of events and motives eminently calculated to stimulate that
self-imposed labour and discipline which the early democracy had first
called forth. But when we advance farther down, from the restoration of
the democracy after the Thirty Tyrants to the time of Demosthenes, we
venture upon this brief anticipation, in the conviction that one period
of Grecian history can be thoroughly understood only by contrasting it
with another,--we shall find a sensible change in Athenian patriotism.
The active sentiment of obligation is comparatively inoperative, the
citizen, it is true, has a keen sense of the value of the democracy as
protecting him and insuring to him valuable rights, and he is, moreover,
willing to perform his ordinary sphere of legal duties towards it; but he
looks upon it as a thing established, and capable of maintaining itself
in a due measure of foreign ascendency, without any such personal efforts
as those which his forefathers cheerfully imposed upon themselves. The
orations of Demosthenes contain melancholy proofs of such altered tone
of patriotism,--of that languor, paralysis, and waiting for others to
act, which preceded the catastrophe of Chæronea, notwithstanding an
unabated attachment to the democracy as a source of protection and good
government. That same preternatural activity which the allies of Sparta,
at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, both denounced and admired in
the Athenians, is noted by the orator as now belonging to their enemy
Philip.
Such variations in the scale of national energy pervade history, modern
as well as ancient, but in regard to Grecian history, especially, they
can never be overlooked. For a certain measure, not only of positive
political attachment, but also of active self-devotion, military
readiness, and personal effort, was the indispensable condition of
maintaining Hellenic autonomy, either in Athens or elsewhere; and became
so more than ever when the Macedonians were once organised under an
enterprising and semi-Hellenised prince. The democracy was the first
creative cause of that astonishing personal and many-sided energy which
marked the Athenian character, for a century downwards from Clisthenes.
That the same ultra-Hellenic activity did not longer continue, is
referable to other causes, which will be hereafter in part explained. No
system of government, even supposing it to be very much better and more
faultless than the Athenian democracy, can ever pretend to accomplish its
legitimate end apart from the personal character of the people, or to
supersede the necessity of individual virtue and vigour.
During the half-century immediately preceding the battle of Chæronea,
the Athenians had lost that remarkable energy which distinguished them
during the first century of their democracy, and had fallen much more
nearly to a level with the other Greeks, in common with whom they were
obliged to yield to the pressure of a foreign enemy. We here briefly
notice their last period of languor, in contrast with the first burst of
democratical fervour under Clisthenes, now opening--a feeling which will
be found, as we proceed, to continue for a longer period than could have
been reasonably anticipated, but which was too high-strung to become a
perpetual and inherent attribute of any community.[b]
FOOTNOTES
[17] So in the Italian republics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
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.
[Illustration: THEATRE OF PHOCIS]
[Illustration]