ATHENS . 478—401 B.C.

CHAPTER IV

THE PERICLEAN DEMOCRACY

I

EPHIALTES’ REFORM OF THE AREOPAGUS

IT would appear that no measures of constitutional reform are to be attributed to the period between the invasion of Xerxes and the ostracism of Cimon. There are indeed two changes of great importance which are assigned to this epoch, the one by Aristotle and the other by Plutarch. It is asserted by Aristotle that the patriotism of the Areopagus in the crisis of the evacuation of Athens in 480 b.c. secured for it the revival of its old ascendancy in the state, and that the supremacy thus restored continued for some seventeen years until the fall of Cimon from power. On the other hand, it is asserted by Plutarch that Aristides, in recognition of the services rendered by Athenians of every rank and grade in the repulse of the Persians, threw open the archonship, apparently in 479 or 478 b.c., to all four of the Solonian Classes. There are good grounds for regarding both these statements as mere inventions. It is not until we come to the fall and ostracism of Cimon that we enter on a further stage in the development of the democracy.

The measure which comes first in point of date, if not of importance, is Ephialtes’ Reform of the Areopagus. That, under the provisions of his law, the Areopagus was deprived of all its powers except its jurisdiction in cases of homicide, and that the powers of which it was deprived were divided between the Council, the Assembly, and the popular courts of law, may be regarded as certain. But what these powers were, other than the guardianship of the laws, is quite uncertain. It is probable that by the ‘guardianship of the laws’ we are to understand, not the right of vetoing any proposed alteration of the law, but merely the right of compelling the magistrates to conform to the laws in the administration of their office. It is more than likely that the importance of the measure lay, not so much in its practical results, as in the assertion of a principle. The principle involved was none other than that of the Sovereignty of the People. If sovereignty were vested in the people, it seemed to follow that the will of the people, as expressed either in the Assembly or in the law-courts, must be final. The right of either directly overruling the decisions of the people, or indirectly interfering with their execution, could be conceded to no other body in the state. If the guardianship of the laws is to be interpreted as the right of veto, it meant that the Areopagus could directly overrule the decisions of the Assembly and the law-courts; but even if it meant nothing more than the right of compelling the magistrates to conform to the laws, it gave the opportunity for indirect interference with the popular will. The constitution too of the Areopagus can have been hardly less offensive to democratic sentiment; for the members of the Areopagus were appointed indirectly, and they held office for life. The archons, it is true, were appointed by sortition in conformity with democratic principles, but they entered automatically into the Council of the Areopagus at the end of their term of office, and hence over their appointment as Areopagites the people had no direct control. In the democracy of the fifth century no other office could be held for more than a year; even a strategos autocrator, such as Pericles, had to be annually re-elected. The Areopagite alone held office for life.

Whatever may have been the importance of the Reform in its practical results, there can be no question of its importance as the assertion of a principle. By the Athenians themselves it was always regarded as the turning-point in the history of their con­stitution. It was the first of a series of reforms which changed the moderate constitution of the epoch of the Persian Wars into the extreme democracy of the Peloponnesian War. The virtual disestablishment of this venerable Council must have come at the time as a severe shock to a great body of religious sentiment at Athens, and it is not unlikely that in this religious sentiment we are to find the explanation of the hold which the Areopagus seems to have retained on the Athenian mind for more than a century after the reform of Ephialtes. Not only was Ephialtes’ measure repealed by the Thirty, but it was to the Areopagus that Athens turned in its hour of need, alike after Aegospotami and Chaeronea.

It is probable that a substitute for the guardianship of the laws hitherto exercised by the Council of the Areopagus was provided by the institution of the Graphe Paranomon, one of the most characteristic features of the Athenian State in the latter part of the fifth century. It is remarkable that no hint is given in the Constitution of Athens as to the date of its enactment, although it is referred to in the account of the Revolution of the Four Hundred, by which time it had come to be regarded as the chief constitutional safeguard of the democracy. It was an indictment for bringing before the Assembly measures which were unconstitutional; i.e. in conflict with the laws of the state. Although any Athenian citizen was at liberty to bring forward a motion for a new law, or for the amendment of an old one, the proposer was liable to be prosecuted on the ground that the proposed enactment was inconsistent with the law, or contrary to the public interest. Even if the proposal had become law, its author was still liable to prosecution under the Graphe Paranomon until the expiration of a year from the passing of the measure.

II.       

ADMISSION OF THE ZEUGITAE TO THE ARCHONSHIP

Ephialtes’ Reform of the Areopagus was effected in the ar­chonship of Conon (462—1 b.c.), probably after the ostracism of Cimon early in the year 461 b.c. The next measure of reform recorded by Aristotle belongs to the year of Mnesitheides, 457-6 b.c. The archonship, in common with the more important magistracies, had hitherto been confined to the two highest classes in the Solonian system, the Pentacosiomedimni and Knights. It was now thrown open to the third class, the Zeugitae. From a passage in the Constitution of Athens it would appear that the disability of the lowest class, the Thetes, was never formally removed, although in practice the disqualification was evaded by a legal fiction. It may well be, however, that the legal fiction belongs to the restored democracy of the fourth century b.c., and that the Thetes were ineligible for this office, in practice as well as in theory, throughout the fifth century. Once more it is probable that the reform was more important as the assertion of a principle than in its practical effect. The introduction of sortition in 487 b.c. had reduced the archonship to a magistracy with purely routine duties. So far as the conduct of the business of the state was concerned, it mattered little who held this office; but in virtue of the old associations which gathered round its name, the archonship must still have made some appeal to the imagination, and it had thus become a position of dignity such as was admirably calculated to reward the modest ambition of the humbler class of citizens. The principle, however, which was asserted by the reform, that of the equal eligibility of all, was fundamental in the ancient conception of democracy.

III.     

PAYMENT FOR THE JURORS AND THE RESTRICTION OF THE FRANCHISE

The next change in the constitution to which we come is of a very different character. It is possibly the most far-reaching of all the reforms of this period in its effect on the working of the constitution. In the fully developed democracy there is no feature more characteristic than the system of payment for service. It meant the assertion of the principle of equal opportunity for all, and in its practical effect it enabled even the poorest members of the citizen body to take part in the work of administration, in a degree, and to an extent, that is well-nigh inconceivable to those who are familiar with democracy only in its modern forms. The first step in the introduction of this system was taken by Pericles himself, when he introduced payment for the dicasts, or jurors. The precise date of this measure, and the original amount of the payment, are both uncertain. The only indication of date is afforded by the statement of Aristotle that the measure was brought forward by Pericles as a bid for popular favour, and in order to counterbalance the wealth of Cimon. This would point to a period when Pericles had succeeded to the leadership of the popular party, and Cimon was still the leader on the other side. The date, therefore, cannot be before the ostracism of Cimon, for Ephialtes, not Pericles, was then the leader of the popular party; and it cannot be during the exile of Cimon, for Aristotle’s statement implies his presence at Athens. It must, therefore, fall between his return from exile, which happened probably in 451 b.c., and his sailing for Cyprus in 450 b.c. It will be seen that the question of date is of some importance in its bearing on the connection between this reform and another measure attributed to Pericles, that of the restriction of the franchise. In the period of the Archidamian War (431-21 b.c.) the jurors were paid at the rate of three obols, or half a drachma, a day, but there is some evidence that the fee was originally fixed at two obols, and that it was raised to three obols by Cleon in 425 B.C.

The last of the reforms enumerated by Aristotle is the law of Pericles, passed in the archonship of Antidotus (451—50 b.c.) which confined the franchise to those of citizen birth on both sides. From two other references to this measure it may be inferred that, although the law was passed in 451—50 b.c., it was not carried into effect until half-a-dozen years later. In the year 445 b.c. an Egyptian pretender named Psammetichus sent a present of 30,000 medimni (c. 45,000 bushels) of corn, in order to secure the support of Athens. As a preliminary to the distribution of the corn, the list of citizens was revised, and nearly 5000 names were struck off the register.

To those who are unacquainted with the Greek conception of democracy it may seem a paradox that the name of the most famous champion of the popular cause in the ancient world should be associated with a measure which seems to the modern mind so essentially undemocratic. It may at once be admitted that few measures of constitutional reform at Athens have a better right to be called reactionary. Cleisthenes had broken down the old barriers which excluded, not only the resident alien, but the off­spring of mixed marriages, from the franchise, and the presence within the citizen body of a numerous class who were partly of non-Athenian origin must have constituted a strong link of sentiment between the sovereign people and its subject-allies. The repeal of the liberal legislation of Cleisthenes, and the restriction of the franchise to those who could prove Athenian parentage on both sides, meant the assertion of the principle of privilege in its most offensive form. It proclaimed that the Empire existed for the benefit of Athens. But, although the measure was reactionary, it was not undemocratic in the ancient sense of the term. Democracy in the modern world has had monarchy and the feudal system as its antecedents, and it has meant the overthrow of privilege. Democracy in the ancient world had oligarchy, not monarchy, as its predecessor, and it was a form of oligarchy which had little in common with the feudalism of the Middle Ages. To the Greeks democracy meant, not the overthrow of privilege, but merely the extension of its area. To them it seemed that democracy was as much rooted in privilege as oligarchy itself. It was the grounds on which privilege was based and the number of the privileged that constituted the difference between the two forms of government. Cleisthenes was a reformer born out of due time. The pretext for the law of Pericles is stated to have been the excessive number of the citizens; in other words, it was alleged that the citizen body had become unmanageably large. It may be surmised, however, that the real motive of the measure was to enhance the value of the lucrative privileges attaching to the franchise, by limiting the number of those entitled to share in them. Hence it is not difficult to trace an organic connection between the two measures of reform of which Pericles was the author; the introduction of pay, and the restriction of the franchise. It is a connection which becomes all the more evident, if we are at liberty to assume that both these laws were passed within the same twelve months, and that both were bids for popular favour in the strife of parties which had broken out afresh on Cimon’s return from exile.

IV.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DEMOCRACY

There are two questions that are suggested by Aristotle’s enumeration of the successive changes in the constitution between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. It may be asked whether Aristotle’s list of reforms is complete; it may also be asked how far the development of the democracy was due to causes other than mere legislative enactment.

To the first question there can be but one answer; the list of changes is clearly incomplete. As has been pointed out there is no mention of the Graphe Paranomon although its institution almost certainly belongs to this period. The payment, again, of the jurors is the only form of payment for public service which is mentioned by Aristotle in this passage; yet in a preceding chapter he has himself enumerated the various other forms of payment, both civil and military, which were in force at this epoch. We may safely ascribe to the period of Pericles’ ascendancy the introduction of payment for the members of the Council, who received a drachma a day, and for all the magistrates, with the exception of the generals and the other military officers. The number of these magistrates is put by Aristotle as high as 700. To Pericles, too, there are probably to be ascribed two other forms of payment; a payment of three obols a day for the soldiers and sailors on active service, over and above the allowance for rations which they had previously enjoyed, and a payment of two obols a day from the Theoric Fund to the poorer classes for each of the three days of the performance of the plays in the theatre. In regard to this latter measure it may be assumed that at this period the system was confined to giving the poor citizen the price of his theatre ticket. In the next century, however, the principle was established of making large distributions of money from this source on the occasion of the more important religious festivals, the whole surplus revenue of the year being ultimately credited to this Fund, which thus became a most serious drain on the financial resources of the State. It may be presumed that no such extended application of the principle could have been anticipated by Pericles and his contemporaries.

On the other hand, it seems certain that payment for attendance at the meetings of the Assembly, which is one of the most familiar features of the extreme democracy of the fourth century b.c., found no place in the constitution of the Periclean Age. A comparison between the Acharnians of Aristophanes (produced in 425 b.c.), in which it is implied that there was at times a difficulty in securing a quorum, with two other of his plays, the Plutus and the Ecclesiazusae (both later than the restoration of the democracy in 403 b.c.), in which there are frequent references to this form of payment, is sufficient to establish the fact. If further proof is needed, it may be found in Aristotle’s statement that it was Agyrrhius, a leading statesman in the early days of the restored democracy, who was responsible for this further extension of the system of payment. The rate was fixed in the first instance at one obol a day, and subsequently raised to three.

Critics of the Athenian democracy, both in ancient and in modern times, have not been slow to direct their attacks against this system of payment for service. Plato, in a well-known passage, brings against Pericles the charge of having corrupted the Athenian character by the introduction of pay. He had made the citizens, it is alleged, indolent, cowardly, greedy of filthy lucre, and loquacious. To the ancients who had watched the effects of the system when carried to its logical conclusion in the course of the century after Pericles even so sweeping a condemnation might seem not unwarranted, and the authority of Aristotle can be adduced in support of Plato’s view. He asserts that the number of those maintained by the state in the fifth century b.c. was not less than 20.000; i.e. one-third of the citizen body, if we accept Eduard Meyer’s estimate of 60,000 for the total number of citizens, or one-half of the whole, if we accept the alternative estimate of 40,000. He regards the system of payment for service as a means of maintaining the poorer classes in idleness; ‘a nation of salaried paupers’ seems to be implied in the passage. It would be, however, in the highest degree uncritical to accept either Aristotle’s figures or Plato’s verdict, as applying to the fifth century b.c. Any such number as 20,000 can only be arrived at by including the sailors and soldiers when engaged on active service. The jurors constituted the larger part of those who received payment for other forms of service, and they appeared to have been, as a rule, elderly or old. The con­ditions of life in ancient Athens were so extraordinarily simple that for those who were past middle life, and whose working days were at an end, the modest rate of pay that was offered might serve as a sort of Old Age Pension. It is difficult to believe that it could have appealed to the vigorous and young.

It would also be uncritical to confuse the conditions of the Demosthenic age with those of the Periclean. In the fifth century b.c. the source from which payment was provided was the tribute of the subject-allies; in the fourth century b.c. Athens had no empire, and consequently no tribute. In the age of Pericles, payment for the jurors, the members of the Council, and the magistrates, imposed on the state a burden that could be borne, although it was inevitable that, in the course of a war so protracted as the Peloponnesian, it should become a burden that was felt. In the Athens of the fourth century b.c., with its payment for attendance at the Assembly and its abuse of the Theoric Fund, and with no source save the internal revenue from which the ex­penditure could be defrayed, the effects of the system may well have been as demoralizing for the character of the citizens as they were, beyond all question, for the finances of the state. It may be assumed that when the system was introduced by Pericles it was intended, not as a means of maintaining in idleness any class of the citizens, but as the means, and the sole means, of enabling all classes of the citizens alike to take their full share in the work of government. If government by the people, in the strictest sense of the term, is an ideal that was attained more com­pletely in Periclean Athens than in any other society of which we have any record, this was in some degree at least the result of the introduction of payment for public service.

But even if Aristotle had given us a complete enumeration of all the measures of reform which were placed on the Statute Book in the second and third quarters of the fifth century b.c., the sum total of these measures would have failed to explain the change from the constitution as it stood in the time of Themistocles to the full blown democracy of the days of Cleon. The explanation is to be sought, not merely in any list of legislative enactments, but also in the change in the conditions, social, economic, and political, of the Athenian State. It may be permissible to look for an analogy in the history of that constitution which is as typical of modern, as the Athenian constitution was of ancient, democracy. No changes of any importance, with the exception of the Articles relating to the Abolition of Slavery, were effected in the con­stitution of the United States during the first hundred years or more of its existence; yet the whole character of the constitution was profoundly modified in the course of the nineteenth century. When we reflect on the extension of the area of the United States, and on the increase in its population during this period; on the industrial revolution which had transformed a society mainly agricultural into one in which the predominant interests were commercial, manufacturing, and financial; on the influx of a vast foreign population, and on the introduction of railways, steam­ships, and telegraphs, we need not be surprised to find that, while the letter of the constitution remained unaltered, the spirit in which it was worked was no longer the same. Things have doubtless moved far more rapidly in the modern world than they ever moved in the ancient, but movement there was at Athens in the fifth century b.c., and the character of Athenian society, and of the Athenian State, underwent modification in more respects than one in the period that followed the Persian Wars.

V.      

THE RISE OF THE DEMAGOGUES

By far the most important of the changes in the character of the Athenian constitution during this period is to be found in the rise of the Demagogues. Hitherto it had been the rule that the political leader should have held office as General, and this meant that he must belong to one of the old families who had a tradition of military skill and command. Shortly before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War a leader of a new type appears on the scene. He is of humble origin (a tradesman or a skilled mechanic), and he has never held office as General. As yet the popular party had been content to find its leaders among the members of the old families, just as in England after the first Reform Bill the Liberal Party was content to find its leaders among the Whig peers. It was only to be expected that a time would come when ‘the People’ would claim to be led by those who were themselves men of the people. The first demagogue of any importance in the constitutional history of Athens is Cleon, but it is commonly inferred from a passage in Aristophanes that he had two predecessors, at least; Eucrates and Lysicles. From Cleon to the Battle of Chaeronea the succession is unbroken. The contrast between the new type of political leader and the old is thus twofold. In the first place, there is the social contrast. Miltiades and Cimon, Xanthippus and Pericles, Thucydides, son of Melesias, and Nicias, even Aristides and Ephialtes, all belonged to what may be called the ‘county families’. Themistocles is the one exception to this rule. The demagogues were town-bred men, whose manners and mode of speech were alike offensive to the aesthetic sense of well-bred Athenians. It is a common charge against them that they were violent and unrestrained in gesture; and the fact that in the Old Comedy they are twitted with foreign birth and a foreign accent may possibly find an explanation in the vulgarity of their language and pronunciation.

The second contrast lies in the unofficial character of the demagogue. To Grote the demagogue is ‘essentially a leader of opposition’. He illustrates, for example, the respective positions of Cleon and Nicias by the relations of the Leader of the Opposition to the Prime Minister in the British Parliament. He even goes so far as to excuse the part played by Cleophon in securing the rejection of the terms of peace proposed by Sparta after the battle of Cyzicus on the ground that ‘a mere opposition speaker like Cleophon did not look so far forward into the future as Pericles would have done’. In short, the demagogue is, first and foremost, a critic of measures, not a formulator of policy. Grote, who was much better acquainted with our Parliamentary system than most of those scholars in other countries who have either accepted his premisses or attacked his conclusions, intended the comparison of the demagogue with the Leader of the Opposition as a mere illustration; as an analogy that was not to be pressed. What is fundamentally true in Grote’s view is that the demagogue need not, and commonly did not, hold any office whatever. His legal position differed in no respect from that of any other member of the Assembly.

That it was possible for one who held no official position to ‘exercise,’ for all that, ‘by far the greatest influence over the people’, as Cleon did at the time of the debate on the fate of the Mytilenean prisoners, finds its explanation in one of the most characteristic principles of the Athenian constitution, the initiative of the individual. To critics of the constitution it appeared one of its gravest defects that any individual citizen had the right to put forward any proposal, however insane it might be. It is true that no decree could be submitted to the people unless it had been sanctioned by the Council, but the liberty of amendment allowed to the Assembly was so large as to render this constitutional safeguard far less effective in practice than had doubtless been intended. In no respect does the Athenian constitution differ more profoundly, both from the Roman Republic, and from the modern systems of Representative Government, than in this. At Rome the initiative lay with the magistrate, while in a parliamentary system even the Private Member, to say nothing of the individual citizen, has surrendered almost all his right of initiative to the Cabinet. Hence no change in the letter of the constitution was required to enable the new type of political leader to emerge. His influence, however, extended far beyond that of the mere critic. Measures of the first importance could be carried in the Assembly in direct opposition to the advice of the Board of Generals, and if this happened no political crisis was involved. Neither the Board as a whole, nor any individual General, was called upon to resign. Consequently, the policy of Athens might be that of ‘the Leader of the Opposition,’ rather than that of ‘the Cabinet.’

It was the rise of the demagogues that first revealed one of the most fatal defects in the Athenian system. There are few con­stitutions in history that have made more ample provision for official responsibility. By the system of Euthynae every magistrate, civil or military, was called upon to render an account at the end of his year of office, and prosecutions for peculation, or other offences, on the part of the official were not infrequent. For political responsibility, however, there was no such provision; indeed, the very theory of political responsibility, i.e, of the responsibility of the statesman for the policy which he advocates, was imperfectly apprehended by the ancient mind. Thucydides, in one passage, seems to imply that in his view the responsibility for the Sicilian Expedition lay with the Assembly which had voted it, rather than with the speakers who had advised it. This defective theory of responsibility mattered little as long as the political leader held an office; for, so long as this was the case, the political responsibility was merged in the official, and could be brought home to the statesman because he was also a magistrate. Miltiades could be convicted for his failure in the Parian Expedition, Cimon ostracized in consequence of his dismissal from Ithome, and Pericles him­self brought to trial for the disappointing results of his plan of campaign in the Peloponnesian War, because each one of these was accountable for the execution of the policy which he had himself proposed. But how could responsibility for a policy be brought home to the orator who had proposed it, when its execution had necessarily to be entrusted to others? It was inevitable that the statesman should contend that his policy had failed, not because it was faulty in itself, but because the soldiers, or the envoys, who were commissioned to carry it out had proved incompetent or corrupt. To take a single example from the history of the Peloponnesian War, the first Sicilian Expedition failed because it was bound to fail under the existing conditions, but the penalty for failure was visited, not on Hyperbolus and the other demagogues whose scheme it was, but on the unfortunate generals, Pythodorus, Sophocles, and Eurymedon, who were fined and exiled, after the Congress of Gela in 424 b.c., because they had failed where failure was inevitable.

The rise of the demagogues was itself a symptom of a change in the economic conditions of Attica, which affected the working of the constitution in more ways than one. Down to the Persian Wars the landed interest was still predominant in the state, but in the course of the next half century industry and commerce became serious rivals to agriculture. The centre of gravity was shifting steadily from the country to the town. If we include in our estimate the slave as well as the free and the alien as well as the citizen, we may assume that at the outbreak of the Pelopon­nesian War the larger part of the population was resident in Athens and the Piraeus, although it is clear from a passage in Thucydides that, if the citizens proper are alone taken into account, the reverse of this would be true. He expressly says that the majority of the Athenians down to the year 431 b.c. still lived in the countryside. The plays of Aristophanes afford ample evidence, if evidence were needed, that the country population was conservative in instinct. It was natural that the small farmer should look up to the wealthier landowners who were his neighbours, and that he should be disposed to follow their lead. No such ties of sentiment could exist between the old families and the population of the town. It was in the urban proletariat that the demagogues found their chief support. Whatever may have been the relative proportion of the rural and urban populations so far as they consisted of citizens, it is quite certain that it would be the urban population, rather than the rural, that would furnish a majority of the voters in the Assembly. The inhabitant of Athens or the Piraeus was on the spot; it would cost him little time or trouble to attend. The dweller in the more distant demes of Attica would hesitate before he sacrificed a day’s work on his farm (and it must often have meant two days rather than one), in order to exercise his political rights. When payment was once introduced, the attractions of office, as magistrate, or on the Council, or in the law-courts, would make a stronger appeal to the town than to the country. Even a drachma a day would hardly be a sufficient compensation to the farmer or the fisherman; to the poorer sort of citizens in the City and the Port half this amount proved an alluring bait. It was from this class that the jurors, at any rate, must have been chiefly recruited. It followed that the policy of Athens came to be determined more and more by the votes of the urban population, and that the interests of the country were subordinated to those of the town. Nor can we take the tone and temper of the Assembly in the Periclean Age as a fair criterion of the sentiment of the citizen body as a whole. It hardly admits of doubt that the Assembly was more radical in its views than the people.

VI.

THE DEMOS AND THE EMPIRE

Two other changes remain to be noticed, each of which contributed to render the constitution still more democratic in spirit. Both were the outcome of the rise and development of the Athenian Empire.

Down to the beginning of the fifth century b.c., Athens was a land, rather than a sea power. Its navy was insignificant, and the military strength of the state resided in the quality of its hoplites or heavy’ infantry. This force, being mainly recruited from the small farmers of the countryside, was conservative in sentiment. The Persian Wars and the policy of Themistocles converted Athens into a naval power of the first rank, and with the growth of her Empire her superiority at sea to all other states in the Greek world became more and more marked. After the Thirty Years Peace it was evident that it was to her fleet, and solely to her fleet, that Athens must look for the maintenance of that Empire. Those of the seamen who were citizens were drawn from the class of Thetes, who for the most part were resident in Athens and the Piraeus, and formed the radical element in the community.

 In one of the most striking passages in the Athenian Constitution, wrongly ascribed to Xenophon, the writer is at pains to point out the connection between the Athenian Empire and the Athenian Democracy. The Empire, he argues, depends on the navy, and the navy on the seafaring population, and it is precisely because it is the navy that maintains the power and prestige of Athens that the class from which the crews are drawn is paramount in the Assembly. The first article in the programme of the Reactionaries after the failure of the Sicilian Expedition was the disfranchisement of this class; but if the disfranchisement were to be permanent, the price which would have to be paid for this reform was the surrender of the Empire. To the conservative thinkers of the next century, to Isocrates and Aristotle, it seemed that the policy of Themistocles and Pericles had been the undoing of Athens. It is Isocrates who, amid the humiliations of the Social War in the middle of the fourth century b.c., preaches the doctrine that the one chance for Athens lies in the renunciation of her last claims to empire or supremacy in the Aegean.

The second of these changes is to be found in the gradual process by which the Athenian courts acquired jurisdiction over the whole body of the subject-allies. It would be difficult to exaggerate the effect of this jurisdiction as an instrument of political education. It rendered a large proportion of the citizen body familiar with the circumstances and conditions of any number of states within the Empire; and it was the experience thus gained by the jurors in the courts of law that qualified them to deal with questions of imperial policy, when they came before them in the Council or the Assembly. It would also be difficult to exaggerate the influence of this imperial jurisdiction on the character of the constitution, and on the spirit in which it was worked. It was the citizen of the poorest class who was attracted by the pay, and it was he who sat enthroned in the courts. It is a remark of Aristotle’s that it is by means of the popular courts of law that the masses have gained their strength, since, when the democracy is master of the voting power in the courts, it is master of the constitution. The courts were in almost perpetual session; their jurisdiction extended to every aspect and department of public life; and from their decision there was no appeal. In the age of Cleon the sovereignty of the people finds expression in the law­courts even more effectively than in the Council and Assembly.

CHAPTER V