THE PERSIAN EMPIRE AND THE WEST

CHAPTER VI.

ATHENS: THE REFORM OF CLEISTHENES

I

CLEOMENES AND ATHENS

DURING the twenty years that followed the expulsion of the tyrants from Athens there is no one who plays a more important part on the stage of Greek history than Cleomenes, king of Sparta. In Herodotus, who is our main authority for the career of Cleomenes, the Spartan king appears in a most unfavourable light. He succeeded to the throne by the mere accident of birth, for had the succession been determined by merit rather than by birth, his half-brother Dorieus would have been king; he was half crazy from the first, and he degenerated into a drunkard; his reign was brief, and he died by his own hands—such is the view of Herodotus. Yet most modern historians are agreed that Cleomenes was both a statesman and a general of exceptional merit, and that, directly and indirectly, he did much to determine the issue of the Persian wars. It must be remembered that Herodotus’ account of him is derived from various sources and that almost all of them are tainted. Athenian tradition, the source that flows most freely, could hardly fail to see in him the would-be destroyer of the liberties of Athens. The other sources from which it may be presumed that Herodotus derived his information were the Spartan ephors, the descendants of the first wife of King Anaxandridas, the sons or grandsons of the exiled Demaratus, and Argive and Aeginetan tradition. Were authorities such as these likely to do justice to the memory of the Spartan king? If the alliance between Plataea and Athens is correctly dated to 519 bc, the reign of Cleomenes must have begun not later than 520, and it lasted at least until 489. Thus a reign which Herodotus describes as brief extended over more than thirty years. His career was as important in the internal history of Sparta itself as in the relations of that state to the rest of the Greek world. It is clear that he was the last Spartan king who governed as well as reigned, if we may venture to borrow from Talleyrand’s definition of a constitutional monarch; but it is not so clear whether his reign was a period of reaction, or merely of arrested development. If we are to accept as satisfactory evidence the statements to be found in Herodotus as to the powers exercised by the ephors in the reigns of his predecessors, we cannot but see in his reign a period of reaction. He must have succeeded, in familiar phrase, in putting back the hands of the clock. On the other hand, it is possible that some of the details in Herodotus’ narrative of earlier Spartan history are anachronisms such as are not uncommon in popular tradition. However this may be, the mere fact that the history of Sparta during this momentous period is for the most part narrated in connection with the name of Cleomenes himself indicates sufficiently that Spartan policy was both determined and carried out by the king rather than by the ephors. Indeed, from the verdict of Herodotus we may appeal with confidence to the verdict of the king’s own contemporaries. To what other Spartan king do we find such a series of appeals addressed as those recorded by Herodotus himself—the Plataeans, Maeandrius, Isagoras, Aristagoras, and, the most significant of all, the Scythians?

Three parties may be distinguished in the political life of Athens after the expulsion of Hippias. In the first place, there were the adherents of the exiled tyrant. An impartial survey of the evidence renders the inference inevitable that down to the battle of Marathon the Peisistratid faction could still count on a large body of supporters in the Assembly. If we would understand Athenian history down to Marathon we must allow for the influence of this party throughout the period. Although the Greek tyrant, unlike the English monarch of the seventeenth century, was surrounded by no halo of legitimacy, and although his claims were not buttressed up by any theory of Divine Right, yet the existence of a party whose object was the restoration of Hippias as tyrant is a factor in the political history of Athens from the fall of the tyranny to the Battle of Marathon which can as little be disre­garded as the influence of the Jacobites in the politics of our country during the half century that followed the flight of James II. The second party was the old aristocratic faction, which included the great bulk of the gene or clans. The leader of this party was Isagoras. Lastly there were the Alcmaeonidae, probably the most important of all the clans. To the old influence of this clan was now added the popularity resulting from the part which it had played in the overthrow of the tyranny. Its leader was Cleisthenes whose mother was Agariste, the daughter of the famous tyrant of Sicyon.

It was natural that King Cleomenes should anticipate that what had happened in other states in which Sparta had helped to over­throw a tyranny would happen also at Athens. In the Peloponnesian states generally, the fall of a tyranny had been followed by the establishment in power of an oligarchy subservient to Spartan interests, and amenable to Spartan influence. Doubtless Cleomenes imagined that the fall of Hippias would be followed at Athens by the ascendancy of the aristocratic party led by Isagoras. For the moment the serious danger to the ascendancy of Isagoras lay in the popularity of the Alcmaeonidae and their leader Cleisthenes. For more than three years, however, after the expulsion of Hippias, the anticipations of Cleomenes were fulfilled. In the party struggle between Isagoras and Cleisthenes the latter was worsted and in the spring of 508 bc. Isagoras was elected to the archonship, which was still the supreme executive office in the Athenian political system. It was then that the unexpected happened. On the fall of the tyrants, a revision of the lists of the citizens had been demanded, with the result that a large number of those who owed their position in the citizen body to the patronage of Peisistratus and Hippias were deprived of their rights. It is difficult to determine whether Cleisthenes was a supporter of this measure of disfranchisement; the result, however, of such a measure can only have been favourable to the party of his rival Isagoras. It is not surprising, there­fore, that Cleisthenes, when worsted in the struggle, should have made a direct bid for the support of those so recently disfranchised.

At this point it becomes a matter of some difficulty to determine the precise order of events. If we are to follow the narrative of Herodotus, we must put Cleisthenes’ reform of the constitution before Isagoras’ appeal to Cleomenes. On the other hand, the account in Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens distinguishes between Cleisthenes’ bid for popular support and the enactment of his reforms and suggests that it was the mere bid for popular support that prompted Isagoras’ appeal to Sparta but that the actual enactment of the reforms was subsequent to the failure of Cleomenes’ intervention. In view of the precise chronology of Aristotle’s version, in contrast to the vague indications afforded by Herodotus, it is difficult not to prefer Aristotle’s order of events. If this view is correct it would follow that Isagoras, in order to defeat the schemes of Cleisthenes, resolved on an appeal to Cleomenes. He suggested to the Spartan king that he should demand from the Athenian people the expulsion of the Alcmaeonidae on the ground of the curse which the clan had incurred at the time of the suppression of the conspiracy of Cylon. Cleomenes fell in with this suggestion and demanded the expulsion of the ‘Accursed’. Cleisthenes did not venture to resist and withdrew from Athens. The first success had been scored by Isagoras. Thereupon Cleomenes appeared in person and proceeded to exile from Athens no less than 700 families who formed the chief support of Cleisthenes and his cause. Cleomenes, whose watchword seems to have been the same as Strafford’s, did not stop here. If Cleisthenes intended to convert the constitution into a full blown democracy, Sparta must secure its control of Athens by converting the constitution into a narrow oligarchy. In place of the existing Council a new council, consisting of the adherents of Isagoras, must be established. The attempt to dissolve the Council was frustrated by the courageous resistance of that body, whereupon Cleomenes and Isagoras took possession of the Acropolis. Here they were besieged by the Athenians and as the military force which Cleomenes had brought from Sparta was small, capitulation was inevitable. After a siege of only two days Cleomenes consented to withdraw on condition of a safe conduct for himself and his Spartan force. The supporters of Isagoras who had taken part in the seizure of the Acropolis were put to death by the Athenians, although it would appear that Isagoras himself effected his escape with Cleomenes.

We are here confronted with a serious problem. What council was it that Cleomenes attempted to dissolve? If Herodotus’ order of events is correct it is clearly the new Council of Five Hundred, which owed its existence to the reforms of Cleisthenes. If, how­ever, Aristotle’s order is correct it can only be the old Council of Four Hundred, the institution of which was ascribed by Athenian tradition to Solon.

The withdrawal of Cleomenes from Athens was followed by the immediate recall of Cleisthenes and the exiles, and Cleisthenes lost no time in securing the enactment of his comprehensive measures of reform.

II

THE CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM OF CLEISTHENES

Nowhere is our debt to Aristotle more apparent than in the discussion of the measures of constitutional reform which are to be attributed to Cleisthenes. It would be too much to say that our present knowledge of these reforms as compared with what was surmised on the subject before the recovery of Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens in 1891 is as light to darkness, but it is no exaggeration to say that it is as noon-day compared with twilight. Hitherto our main authority had been Herodotus, and Herodotus in his account of the Reform of Cleisthenes is not seen at his best. Here, as in his other references to Athenian constitu­tional history, he is superficial and inaccurate. The change in the tribal system is to him chiefly a question of the number of the tribes, and the motive ascribed for the change is puerile. All that he has to say is that Cleisthenes altered the number of the tribes from four to ten, and that he also altered their names. Instead of their being called after the four sons of Ion, they were henceforth called after ten heroes, all of whom, with one exception, were native to the soil of Attica. In thus changing the names of the tribes, he was but imitating the action of his maternal grandfather, Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon. The latter, in order to show his contempt for the Dorian race, altered the names of the Dorian tribes at Sicyon to names derived from some of the less honourable of the domestic animals; his grandson, in order to show his contempt for the Ionian race, invented new tribes, and new names for them, in order that the Athenians might no longer have the same tribes as the Ionians. No one who reads this passage can fail to see that, whatever merits Herodotus may have had as an historian, an insight into things constitutional was not among them. There were in addition a couple of references to Cleisthenes in the Politics of Aristotle, one of them extremely obscure in its terminology, and that was almost all that we had to go upon. That Grote should have come so near to the truth in what is most essential in the legislation is a singular proof of his genius as a constitutional historian.

Not the least part of our debt to the Constitution of Athens is that it enables us to rule out much that had been attributed to the Athenian reformer by one writer or another. Cleisthenes did not institute the poplilar courts of law; the Heliaea was the creation of Solon. Nor did Cleisthenes substitute sortition for election in the appointment of the archons; the change came more than twenty years later. He did not even reorganize the army on the basis of his new tribes nor did he institute the Strategia, although both these reforms may fairly be called consequential on the change in the tribal system. The only reforms that we have any warrant for attributing to him are (1) the institution of ten tribes, based on the deme as their unit, in place of the old four Ionic tribes, whose unit was the clan (yénos), and the substitution of the deme for the naucrary as the unit of local administration; (2) the reconstitution of the council on the basis of the new tribes; and (3) the invention of the curious constitutional device known as Ostracism. Of these three changes the one that was at once the most fundamental in its character and the most far- reaching in its consequences was the change in the tribal system.

THE TRIBES AND DEMES

There was much in the structure of the Athenian state that Solon left as he found it. While he altered the qualification for office, he left the qualification for citizenship unchanged. Down to the time of Cleisthenes membership in the citizen body in­volved membership in the phratries and clans. Cleisthenes did not indeed abolish the phratries and clans when he abolished the four Ionic tribes. He allowed them to continue as religious and social institutions; what he did was to dissociate them entirely from the political system. The unit of the new tribes was to be the deme, and not the clan.

All our evidence goes to prove that the Demes were ancient divisions of Attica. They may be compared to the English parish, if it is remembered that the comparison with the parish is merely by way of illustration, and that it is not an analogy that can be pressed. Herodotus himself assumes the existence of the demes in the age of Peisistratus, and Plato in that of the Peisistratidae. From one passage in Herodotus it is clear that Athenian tradition carried them back to the Heroic Age. But while there is no good ground for crediting Cleisthenes with the invention of the deme, there is some reason for supposing that the demes in the city of Athens itself were created by him for the purposes of his system. The evidence for this view is to be found in a passage in Herodotus relating to the return of Peisistratus from exile, in which the inhabitants of the demes are contrasted with those of the city. If the city demes were artificial in origin, they would be analogous to the artificial boroughs, such as Marylebone, Finsbury, or the Tower Hamlets, which were the creation of the First Reform Bill of 1832. What then was the relation of the new tribes to the demes? It is, unfortunately, not quite certain what was the view of Herodotus. The reading of the MSS makes him say that Cleisthenes assigned 10 demes to each tribe, which would imply that there were 100 demes in all the tribes. An emendation of the text which has won wide acceptance makes him say, however, that the demes were arranged ‘in ten groups’ instead of ‘in groups of ten,’ which is the reading of the MSS. At all events his silence suggests that between the tribes and the demes there was no connecting link. The evidence at our com­mand—evidence which is partly derived from the Constitution of Athens, and was partly known before its recovery—proves conclusively that Herodotus is in error. The number of demes in the third century b.c. was 174, and there is no sufficient reason for supposing that it was ever materially less; the number of demes in each tribe was not uniform and between the tribe and the deme there was an intermediate link, the Trittys. Each tribe consisted of three trittyes, but the trittys might consist of a single deme, or it might include several. Nor were the demes in a trittys, if more than one was included, necessarily contiguous.

A system more artificial than the tribes and trittyes of Cleisthenes it might well pass the wit of man to devise. In the new tribal system the demes were arranged in three groups corre­sponding to their geographical position. The first group consisted of the demes in Athens itself and its suburbs; the second, of the demes on the coast of Attica; and the third of those in the interior of the country. Each tribe included one or more demes in each of the three groups. The deme or demes from each group in each tribe made up a trittys, so that in all there were thirty trittyes, ten in the city and its suburbs, ten in the Paralia, or coast district, and ten in the interior or midland region. The trittys was thus purely artificial in character, a fact which helps to explain how it came about that down to the recovery of the Constitution of Athens hardly a single reference to it was to be found in Greek literature. Had the trittys always been a single deme, or had it always consisted of contiguous demes, it would have been different. As it was, it served no further purpose than that of constituting a mere link between the tribe and the deme. Unlike the latter, it had no separate functions of its own to discharge. While the tribe and the deme were corporations with officers, assemblies and property of their own, the trittys had no corporate existence.

When we come to ask the question, what was the object of Cleisthenes in this reform of the tribal system? it is clear that two questions, rather than one, are involved. The first, and much the more important, question is, what was the object of Cleisthenes in substituting the deme for the clan as the basis of the organiza­tion of the citizen body? The second, and less important, question is, what was his motive in introducing the highly artificial system of trittyes? It is unfortunate that these two entirely different questions have been too often confused.

The substitution of the deme for the clan meant in effect the transition from the principle of kinship to that of locality, or residence. The clan was based on kinship, actual or supposed; the deme was a local division of Attica. A similar transition from the one principle to the other is to be traced in Roman History also. There was a time when at Rome the legislative body was the Comitia Curiata, i.e. a time when the citizen body was organized on the basis of the gens, a unit which implied real or presumed kinship. In the historical period the Comitia Tributa has taken the place of the Comitia Curiata, i.e. the citizen body is organized on the basis of the tribe, a unit which was originally local in character. It is significant of the difference between the history of Greece and that of Rome—between the genius of the Greeks and that of the Romans—that a change which at Rome was effected in the course of generations by a process of slow development, was effected at Athens in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye; we can put our finger on the moment and the man. To those who are familiar with the history of our own country no principle can appear more obvious than that of locality. To the Greek mind it was otherwise. Not only had Solon left the principle of kinship untouched, but even Cleisthenes, when he substituted the deme for the clan, applied the principle of locality in a modified or restricted form. Membership in a deme in the time of Cleisthenes depended on residence within its borders, and so far the deme was purely local in character. But strange as it must seem to the modern mind, the privilege of membership in any given deme was made hereditary so that in any subsequent generation an Athenian was a demotes of a given deme, not because he was resident in it, but because his ancestor had been resident in it at the time of the Reform of Cleisthenes. Even the cleruch in a distant colony retained his membership in his deme. Thus in all the demes of Attica there were two classes of residents in the deme; the demotai, who were both members of the deme and resident within it, and the enkektemenoi, who although resident in the deme were members of some other deme.

Grote, with much less evidence before him than is now avail­able, had divined the motive of Cleisthenes in substituting locality for kinship as the principle of the organization of the citizen body. It was, as Grote puts it, in order to secure the admission to citizenship of a body of free residents in Attica who were not of pure Athenian descent, and who consequently could not be admitted to citizenship without a shock to the religious sentiment of the Athenians, so long as citizenship involved membership in the clan, which was an association largely religious in character. In the words of a modern jurist: ‘The Greek City State was not conceived as an aggregate of individuals, but consisted of clusters of kinsmen, strongly bound together by common interests and common religion. The earlier ages may be characterized as epochs of federation—the federation of kindreds’. Athens after the Reform of Cleisthenes was no longer to be a federation of kindreds.

The new evidence afforded by Aristotle enables us to trace the history, and estimate the importance, of this class of free residents in Attica of impure Athenian descent, whose existence was postulated by Grote. To understand the origin of this class we must go back to Solon. Plutarch, in the Life of Solon, tells us that Solon, in order to stimulate the industrial development of Athens, granted the privilege of citizenship to those resident aliens (peroiKot), who satisfied two conditions; they must be skilled workmen, who came to Athens for the practice of their art or craft, and they must bring wife and children with them. It is generally agreed that there are traces in Athenian art of the sixth century bc, especially in vase painting, of the growth of Ionic and other foreign influences.

It is probable that under Peisistratus and his sons the class of resident aliens had increased rapidly in numbers. The growing importance of this class would explain the statement of Aristotle, in the Constitution of Athens, that this class, those who were ‘not of pure descent’, formed one of the chief supports of the tyranny. But the position of this class in the citizen body must have re­mained precarious, so long as citizenship was connected with the clan and the phratry, admission to either of which was so jealously safeguarded. Their motive in supporting the tyrants was clearly, as indeed Aristotle asserts, the fear of losing their privileges if the protection of the tyrants were withdrawn. Their fears proved only too well founded, for (as has been described above) on the expulsion of Hippias the register of citizens was revised, and a large number of those citizens who could not prove pure Athenian descent were struck off the list. What happened at Athens on the fall of the Peisistratid dynasty was to be repeated in a similar form a generation later on the fall of the tyranny at Syracuse. There too those who owed their place in the citizen body to the tyrants were deprived of their rights by the restored democracy. The object, then, of Cleisthenes in dissociating citizenship from the clan, and connecting it with the deme, was to facilitate the admission to citizenship of those who could not prove pure Athenian descent, and to render their position unassailable for the future. There were no associations of kinship with the deme, and there were no religious sentiments to be shocked by the admission to the ranks of the demotae of those whose origin was wholly or partially foreign. In order to secure still further the position of this class of citizens, it was enacted that henceforward the official designation of a citizen should be by his deme, and not, as hitherto, by his patronymic. The patronymic might reveal the secret of a foreign origin; the name of the deme could convey no such information. For half a century or more Athens remained faithful to the liberal policy of her great reformer, and her citizenship was open to those who had no claim to pure Athenian blood. It was left to the most famous democratic statesman of the ancient world—Pericles himself—to reverse the enlightened policy of his predecessor, and once more to impose the test of pure Athenian descent on both sides.

To the second question, What was the object of Cleisthenes in constituting the new tribes in so artificial a manner? the answer commonly given is that this artificial constitution of the tribes was directed against the danger of a recrudescence of the old feuds between the parties of the Plain, the Coast, and the Hill­country—the Pedion, the Paralia, and the Diacria. As each tribe consisted of three trittyes, each from a different region of Attica, it was clearly impossible, so it is argued, for any one of these factions to exercise a dominating influence in any one of the tribes. This explanation of the motive of Cleisthenes is clearly based on two assumptions, for neither of which there is adequate evidence. It assumes in the first place that the rivalry of the three factions still persisted as late as the time of Cleisthenes, and it also assumes that the three regions of the Cleisthenean system correspond to the threefold division of Attica into the Pedion, the Paralia, and the Diacria, of the period which preceded the tyranny of Peisistratus. That the feuds which prevailed during the generation which separated the legislation of Solon from the first tyranny of Peisistratus, and were largely accountable for the success of the tyrant, were local in character, does not admit of doubt. What may well be doubted—what certainly cannot be proved—is that the three parties with which we have to deal at the time of the Reform of Cleisthenes—the party of Cleisthenes himself, that of Isagoras, and that of the Peisistratidae—are identical with the old local factions. It may fairly be argued that it was the firm rule of Peisistratus and his .sons that had effaced the local lines of cleavage, and given to the whole country a sense of unity that it had not possessed half a century earlier. Since the middle of the sixth century new questions had come to the front, and political parties were now grouped according to new prin­ciples.

Still less ground is there for the assumption that the three regions of the Cleisthenean system are identical with the Pedion, the Paralia, and the Diacria. The town area, the city and its suburbs, could have formed but a small part of the Pedion, most of which would fall within the pecrdyeios, or ‘midland’, region. It is usually supposed that the demes in the neighbourhood of Marathon were included in the Diacria; but in the Cleisthenean system these were divided between the midland and the coast districts. Finally, if the old view is correct, that the Paralia in the popular sense meant the southern part of Attica, the triangle which is bounded on two sides by the sea, and the apex of which is Sunium, then there is little correspondence between the Paralia of Cleisthenes—the demes situated on the coast—and the Paralia in the popular sense.

But if this explanation of the object of Cleisthenes in constituting the tribes on the basis of the trittys is to be ruled out, what motive can be suggested for a scheme so peculiar? Much the most probable motive is the desire to weaken the influence of the old Eupatrid families, an influence which was mainly local, and found its centre in the clan. In the new tribe, composed of three trittyes taken from three different regions of Attica, no family, however great its local influence might be, could hope to control more than a third of the voters in any one tribe. There was, however, a further result of the system of trittyes which was to prove of such importance in the development of the Athenian democracy that, we are compelled to surmise that it must have been one of his principal objects in his reform of the tribes. One trittys in each tribe consisted of a single deme situate either in the city of Athens or in its suburbs. It was in the city and its immediate neighbourhood that the new citizens, ‘those not of pure descent’, were congregated. Some of this class were doubtless resident in the Paralian demes but none can have been found in rural Attica. Cleisthenes thus secured that in each of the ten tribes there should be a compact body of voters who were his own special adherents, and owed their position in the body politic to his reforms. The influence of this class would be out of all proportion to their numbers, for the simple reason that, being on the spot, they would be in a position to exercise their right of voting far more frequently than those members of the tribes whose homes were in the more distant parts of Attica, whether in the coast or the midland region.

It has often been pointed out that one consequence of the new tribal system was that there could be no further danger of any conscious opposition of the interests of Athens to those of Attica, since there were no tribes that were purely Athenian in this narrow sense, and none that were purely Attican. So far the working of the system was beneficial to the interests of the state as a whole. But there was another consequence, to which attention is not so commonly called, which was far from beneficial. It was inevitable that, when the interests of rural Attica conflicted with those of the city, the interests of the former should be sacrificed to those of the latter.

Down to the Reform of Cleisthenes the unit of local adminis­tration was the naucrary. The precise nature both of the naucrary itself and of its functions is obscure, but we can gather that it was a subdivision, local in character, of the old Ionic tribes, that it was presided over by a president called naucraros, and that it raised and administered funds. For the naucraria Cleisthenes substituted the deme, a subdivision of his new tribes, and, as has been explained above, also local in character. Its president was the Demarch, and the deme, like the naucrary, had Funds to administer. The deme varied almost as much in size as the English parish. There must have been not a few demes with less than ioo demotae, while the largest demes must have counted some thousands of members. Thucydides speaks of the deme of Acharnae as furnishing 3000 hoplites to the army, a statement which would imply 4000 demotae at the least.
 

THE REFORM OF THE COUNCIL

Our authorities, Aristotle as well as Plutarch, agree in attributing the institution of a Council, side by side with the primitive Council of the Areopagus, to Solon. Aristotle has nothing to tell us as to the prerogatives and duties of this Solonian Council, although Plutarch attributes to Solon the provision that no measure could be brought before the Assembly except in the form of a probouleuma, or proposal of the Council. However that may be, the ancient writers are unanimous in representing it as composed of 400 members, 100 from each of the four Ionic tribes. Cleisthenes based the organization of his reformed Council on the tribe, in its new form, and the deme. The new Council con­sisted of 500 members, 50 from each of the ten tribes. The 50 members of each tribe were apportioned to the demes included in that tribe roughly according to the size of the several demes, and the method of selection was by drawing lots. No citizen could hold office as a member of the Council more than twice in a lifetime. One of the most peculiar features in the new Council was the system of Prytaneis. The year was divided into ten periods of 35 or 36 days each called by the name Prytany, and the 50 Councillors of each tribe held office, under the title of Prytaneis, or Presidents, for one of these periods. During their term of office they acted as a committee of the Council. Nowhere else in the Athenian constitution do we see the democratic principle applied with such rigorous logic as in the Cleisthenean Council. It was of the very essence of the system that the conception of special fitness or capacity was entirely set aside. Anybody who had the ambition had his chance of entering the Council, and, even if the number of citizens is computed at more than the thirty thousand suggested by a passage in Herodotus, something like a third of them must have served on the Council at some period of their lives. Yet the duties which the Councillors had to discharge were as multifarious as could well be imagined, and if most of them were of a routine nature, some were at once important and difficult.

A detailed account of the functions of the Council must be reserved for the chapters which treat of the Periclean age, nor is it easy to determine which of the duties that it performed in the fully developed democracy had been assigned to it by Cleisthenes. It is clear, however, that from the start it must have been the mainspring of the machinery of government. An assembly which any citizen was entitled to attend, which was convened only once in ten days, and might be attended by many or by few, was eminently unfitted for the business of administration. For that a much smaller and more permanent body was required, and such a body was found in the Council. It is unfortunate that Grote should have lent the great authority of his name to the employment of the word Senate as the equivalent for Boulé, the Greek name for the Council. Unless we are to misconceive completely the nature of the Athenian Council, we must get rid of all our associations with the Roman Senate, the Senate of the United States of America, or the Second Chamber of other modern states. The Athenian Council was in no sense of the term a Second Chamber. It was simply a committee of the Assembly, but it was a committee for all purposes, and its work was in the main administrative in character. It was a probouleutic body, to use the technical Greek term; that is to say, its principal task was to prepare the business for the meetings of the Assembly. Hence, as has been explained above, no measure could be brought before the Assembly except in the form of a probouleuma, or proposal submitted by the Council. Such a proposal when ratified by the Assembly was styled a psephisma. The probouleuma may be compared to the report of a Standing Committee of one of our Town or County Councils, which is presented to the Council for its approval; only it must be remembered that at Athens there was but one standing committee, the Council itself. These probouleumata were chiefly concerned with the work of administration, and many of them were what Austin calls ‘occasional’ or ‘particular commands,’ e.g. a direction to certain officials to pay certain sums to certain individuals. It is true that all legislative proposals must originate with the Council, but it is not less true that the normal duty of the Assembly, and therefore of its committee, the Council, was to carry on the business of the state, rather than to make laws. As it was the task of the Council to prepare business for the con­sideration of the Assembly, it fell to the Council to draw up the Programma, or agenda for each meeting of the Assembly. But in addition to its probouleutic duties, the Council was charged with the transaction of any business of state that might turn up and that could not wait, and, either solely, or jointly with the various boards of magistrates, it had the superintendence of the different departments of state.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the part played by the Council in the political education of the Athenian citizen. If it is asked, How could the affairs of a great empire be conducted with success by an Assembly of the whole citizen body? the answer is that it was in his year of office in the Council that the citizen received his training for politics. It is probable that a large proportion of those who attended the meetings of the Assembly with any degree of regularity had been at some time or other members of the Council. During their term of office they had been brought into touch with every department of state, and with every branch of business. It is hardly necessary to point out that the political experience thus gained must have been of peculiar value to the inhabitants of the more remote demes.

OSTRACISM

By far the most peculiar of the measures of constitutional reform which are to be ascribed to Cleisthenes is the institution known as Ostracism. It is found later elsewhere in the Greek world, at Syracuse, Argos, Megara, and Miletus; but of these four states, the two last had been part of the Athenian empire, while Argos was more than once an ally of Athens, and there are other traces of the influence of Athens on the development of its democracy. At Syracuse, where it was called Petalism, we are definitely told by Diodorus that it was introduced in imitation of Athens, and what we are told of Syracuse almost certainly holds good of the other states in which ostracism is found. Hence the full merit of its invention may be claimed for Cleisthenes. In the Greek world, especially in the sphere of constitutional reform, conscious imitation played a large part.

There is certainly no device of ancient statesmanship that will strike the modern reader as more curious than that of ostracism. Once a year, if the Assembly had so decided, but only once, an Ostracophoria was held, but unless at least six thousand citizens took part in the voting the proceedings were null and void. At the ostracophoria the voter might write on a piece of broken pottery the name of any citizen whom he wished to be exiled. The words ostracophoria and ostracism are derived from ostraka, the Greek name for these potsherds, which formed the wastepaper of the ancient world, just as the Syracusan term petalism is derived from the Greek word for leaf, the names at Syracuse being inscribed on olive leaves, instead of potsherds. The citizen against whom most votes were cast was exiled for a period of ten years, at the end of which he returned to full possession of all his rights. His exile did not carry with it the confiscation of his property.

There can be no doubt that the object of Cleisthenes in de­vising this strange constitutional contrivance was to provide a safeguard for the infant democracy against the risk of a restoration of the tyranny just overthrown. As we have seen, the adherents of the exiled Hippias still formed a large and well-organized body of voters in the Assembly; a struggle between the rival factions in the state might easily afford an opportunity for the restoration of the tyrant. Ostracism would furnish the means of getting rid of any prominent supporter of the tyrant’s cause before his in­fluence had become too great and before his plans were matured. And it might well appear to Cleisthenes that even if the Peisis- tratid cause were discredited for good and all, the ambition of individual statesmen might constitute a standing danger to the democracy.

Aristotle, in the Constitution of Athens, asserts not only that the object of the institution was to avert the danger of a restoration of tyranny, but that the immediate motive of Cleisthenes was the desire to get rid of the leader of the Peisistratid party, Hipparchus, the son of Charmus, a cousin of Hippias. This latter statement involves a serious difficulty, inasmuch as we learn from the Constitution itself that Hipparchus was not ostracized until the year 487, some twenty years after the date of the legislation of Cleisthenes. In the passage in the Constitution in which the date of the ostracism of Hipparchus is given he is stated to have been the first person who was ostracized under the provisions of the new law, and his name appears at the head of a list of those who were sent into exile between the First and the Second Persian Invasions. It may be suggested as a solution of the problem that the list given was derived from the psephisma, or decree, which provided for the recall of those who were in exile at the time of the Invasion of Xerxes. As the period of exile was limited to ten years, the name of no one who had been ostracized before the Battle of Marathon (490 bc) could occur in the list. As no record had been preserved of any earlier ostracism it might have been inferred from the psephisma that Hipparchus was not only the first who was ostracized after Marathon but the first who was ostracized under the new law. It does not, however, follow that the law may not have been brought into operation at an earlier date, or that it may not have been directed against some other leader of the exiled tyrant’s party.

But while there is little reason to doubt that ostracism was introduced as a safeguard against the tyrannis it is evident that it soon ceased to be employed with this object in view. After Marathon the cause of the tyrants was discredited for ever, and their adherents must have formed a weak and timid faction. At any rate, after Salamis and Plataea the danger of the restoration of any member of the Peisistratid house had passed away. The last to be ostracized on suspicion of being an adherent of the tyrant’s cause was Megacles, the head of the great Alcmaeonid house, and the date of his ostracism was the year 486 bc. From this time onwards ostracism came to be recognized as a regular weapon of party warfare, to be used by a popular leader against a dangerous rival. In the interval between the two Persian invasions Xanthippus, the father of Pericles, who had married Agariste, the daughter of Cleisthenes himself, was ostracized in 484, and two years later Aristides followed him into exile. In the period after the Second Persian Invasion Themistocles, Cimon and Thucydides, son of Melesias, the rival of Pericles, were all in turn ostracized. It was the long ascendancy of Pericles himself that led to the disuse of the institution. When it was revived in 417 bc to decide between the claims of Nicias and Alcibiades it was felt that this involved a return to an obsolete stage of political development. The weapon was never again employed, although the law appears to have remained unrepealed down to the time of Aristotle.

Critics of the democratic principle have not failed to adduce ostracism as a proof of the inherent injustice of popular government, and one of the most memorable passages in Grote’s History of Greece is that in which he attempts the defence of the institution. Grote argues that, in the first place, under the conditions of Athenian political life in the age of Cleisthenes, some such safeguard was indispensable; that secondly, precautions were provided against its abuse; and that thirdly, it did not involve the confiscation of property or the loss of civic rights. Such considerations could at best constitute a defence of the institution at a time when the restoration of the tyranny was a question of practical politics. They can constitute no sort of a defence of the institution as it was worked after 486 bc. It was, in fact, as injurious to the interests of the state as it was unjust to the individual. To the individual it meant the loss of all that was best worth having during the best years of his life; to the state it meant a fatal impediment to the proper working of the party system. A party unfairly deprived of its leader at some great crisis—and in the Greek democracies the leader counted for much more than he does in our modern popular governments—is not unlikely to have recourse to unconstitutional methods. The answer to the ostracism of Cimon in 461 bc was the assassination of Ephialtes.

III

CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGES BETWEEN CLEISTHENES AND THE INVASION OF XERXES

It will be convenient to describe two further changes which, although they form no part of the Reform of Cleisthenes, may fairly be regarded as consequential on them. These changes are, firstly, the reorganization of the army on the basis of the ten new tribes, which in its turn involved the institution of the ten Generals (strategoi); secondly, the substitution of sortition for election in the appointment of the archons. The first of these measures belongs to the year 501 bc and the second to 487 bc, but it will be seen that the two are closely connected together.

It is probable that the Greek mind would have regarded it as almost inevitable that a change in the political system should involve a corresponding change in the military organization. In Boeotia, for example, the same unit served to determine the political representation and the military quota of each member of the League. We are almost completely in the dark as to the military organization of the Athenian state in the sixth century bc. We know that the levies were raised by the naucraries, and we also know that the Polemarch, one of the nine archons, was commander-in-chief of the army. But this is about all that we do know. It would appear from Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, (though the passage is somewhat obscurely worded) that it was in the year 501—500 that the reorganization of the army on the basis of the ten tribes was effected. Corresponding to each tribe there was to be a taxis, or regiment, of hoplites, and a squadron of cavalry. The taxis was thus the tribe in its military aspect. It was commanded by a strategos, or general, who was elected by the corresponding tribe. The institution of the office of strategos was to prove one of the most important changes that were ever effected in the Athenian constitution. From the first the strategi were General Officers, as well as commanders of the regiments, though the supreme command was still exercised by the Polemarch. But three changes in their duties and position were to follow before long. New officers called taxiarchs were appointed, to whom were transferred their duties as commanders of the regiments; the Polemarch was deprived of all his military func­tions, which were transferred to the board of strategi; and finally a strategos autocrator, or commander-in-chief, was instituted.

Although it is impossible to assign a date to each of these changes, it may be regarded as certain that all three were effected in the course of the twenty years that followed the reorganization of the army. As late as the Battle of Marathon the Polemarch is still titular commander-in-chief, and he still presides at the council of war. If Plutarch can be trusted, the strategi are at this date (490 bc) still commanders of their regiments. But the introduction of the lot in the appointment of the archons in 487 indicates that the Polemarch was at that date deprived of his military duties, and it may be surmised that the institution of the taxiarchs belongs to the same period. Finally, it is clear that the office of strategos autocrator was instituted at ieast as early as 480, since Themistocles was elected to that office in that year.

It was the formation of the Delian League, the assumption by Athens of the direction of the operations against Persia, and the gradual transformation of the League, that led to the develop­ment of the powers of the strategi. In the Periclean age the strategi acquire prerogatives other than purely military ones, and they are prerogatives of great importance. It is the strategia that gives to the Athenian democracy in the latter half of the fifth century b.c. its peculiar character. The institution of the strategia is sometimes regarded as marking a stage in the development of the democracy. If by this it is meant that it marks a stage in the development of the democratic principle in the constitution, nothing could be further from the truth. The strategia was the non-democratic element in the constitution, and it was the sub­stitution of the strategia for the archonship as the chief executive office that strengthened the aristocratic and conservative in­fluences in the state. It meant the substitution of an office that was military in character for one that was civil, and from this two consequences followed. Firstly, an office that is military cannot be filled by sortition, but only by election, and according to Greek ideas sortition is a democratic device, while election is aristocratic in its working. Secondly, while a civil office could be held only once in a lifetime, the holder of an office that is military must be capable of re-election. The institution of the strategia and the growth of its powers gave to the old families a fresh lease of influence, since the strategi were almost invariably chosen from their ranks. What is of still more moment is that it was the strategia that gave the opportunity for one-man power in the democratic constitution. Had the chief executive office still been at once civil in character and annual in tenure, and had there been no such office as that of strategos autocrator, Thucydides could not have described the constitution in the days of Pericles as still in name a democracy, although in fact it was government by her greatest citizen. It is hardly too much to say that, if Athens created, organized, and held, a great empire, it was in virtue of the undemocratic principle contained in the democratic consti­tution. If we would trace the results of undiluted democracy, we must turn to the Athens of the fourth century—to the age of Demosthenes, not to the age of Pericles.

The last constitutional change that is to be ascribed to this period is the application of the lot to the appointment of the archons in the year 487 bc in place of election. It is probable that sortition had been employed from the first in the selection of the members of the new Council of Five Hundred, and it was not long before the principle of sortition was applied to all civil offices without exception. Its application to that which had hitherto been the chief office in the state marks a very definite stage in the growth of the democracy. All our ancient authorities are agreed in regarding sortition as a democratic device for equalizing the chances of rich and poor. Before the true date of the employment of sortition in the appointment of the archons was known, it had sometimes been maintained that the real object of the reform was not to equalize chances, but to avoid faction. In view of the new evidence afforded by Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, it may be regarded as certain that the ancient view is correct. The full effects of the change were not felt until the further step was taken of introducing payment for office. The application of the lot to the archonship in 487 affords conclusive evidence that by that time the office had lost its importance. As Grote long ago argued, the Athenians would never have entrusted to the hazard of the lot any but purely routine duties; least of all would they have entrusted to it the command of the army. Hence the Polemarch must have been stripped of the last remnants of his military prerogatives at the time the change from election to sortition was made.

The lot is another of the features in the Athenian system that critics of democracy, ancient and modern, have selected for attack. In fairness to democracy, and to Athens, it should be borne in mind that the duties of the offices to which sortition was applied were for the most part such as any person of ordinary intelligence and probity could discharge. It should also be pointed out that it was safeguarded in its operation by a process of preliminary selection, known as procrisis. In the appointment for the archonship, for instance, no less than 500 names were selected by the demes and it was out of these 500 candidates that the nine archons were chosen by drawing lots.

IV

ATHENS UNDER CLEISTHENES

Cleisthenes was for the moment supreme at Athens. With the aid of his newly enfranchised citizens he could command a decisive majority in the Assembly. He had, however, still to reckon with Cleomenes. It was one thing to have compelled a Spartan king, in command of a small body of troops, to capitulate; it was another and a very different one to offer resistance to the whole military resources of the Peloponnesian League. Only three or four years before, Hippias had little difficulty in defeating the small force under the command of Anchimolius, but when Cleomenes had appeared in person at the head of a more considerable army, Hippias had been compelled to go into exile. If anything was certain it was that Cleomenes would not tamely submit to his discomfiture. Cleisthenes had every reason to anticipate a Peloponnesian invasion of Attica in the immediate future. It would appear that, in presence of this threatened danger he resolved to appeal to Persia. The passage in Herodotus is so remarkable that it must be transcribed in full.

The Athenians directly afterwards recalled Cleisthenes, and the seven hundred families which Cleomenes had driven out; and, further, they sent envoys to Sardes, to make an alliance with the Persians, for they knew that war would follow with Cleomenes and the Lacedaemonians. When the ambassadors reached Sardes and delivered their message, Artaphrenes, son of Hystaspes, who was at that time governor of the place, inquired of them who they were, and in what part of the world they dwelt, that they wanted to become allies of the Persians. The messengers told them; upon which he answered them shortly that if the Athenians chose to give earth and water to King Darius, he would conclude an alliance with them; but if not, they might go home again. The envoys, ‘on their own responsibility’, anxious to form the alliance, accepted the terms; but on their return to Athens, they fell into deep disgrace on account of their compliance.

It has been generally recognized that this is one of those passages in which the influence of Alcmaeonid tradition can be detected. It is an obvious inference from the phrasing that the embassy was sent soon after the recall of Cleisthenes; that is, it was sent at a moment when his influence was at its height; at a moment when his position in the state may be compared to that of Miltiades on the morrow of Marathon. It follows that the policy of sending the embassy to Sardes must have been the policy of Cleisthenes himself. That Cleisthenes, whose family had had intimate rela­tions with Sardes in the days of the Lydian kings and who was possibly better acquainted with the circumstances of the Persian empire than most people at Athens, should have imagined that Persian aid could be obtained on any other condition than that of giving earth and water, the symbols of homage to the Great King, is incredible. He must have known that the only relation which could subsist between an empire like the Persian and a petty Greek state like Athens was that of suzerain to vassal. It is not less incredible that he should have sent the envoys without instructions on the question of earth and water. What is most incredible of all is that the envoys should have ventured to give earth and water without these instructions.

It is difficult not to find in the narrative of Herodotus a deliberate attempt to shift the responsibility for the act of homage from Cleisthenes to the envoys. Indeed it is more than probable that the attempt may have been made by Cleisthenes himself. The subsequent history of Athens affords not a few examples of the agent being made to suffer in place of the principal. No doubt Cleisthenes was careful not to explain to the Assembly the con­ditions on which the alliance of Persia was to be obtained. It is one of the chief dangers to which popular government is exposed that, when an end is eminently desirable, awkward questions as to the means by which that end is to be obtained are not allowed to be asked. The relations of Athens to Macedon in the age of the orator Demosthenes suggest some parallels. It may be surmised that Cleisthenes calculated that when the Assembly, on the return of the envoys from Sardes, was called upon to choose between homage to Persia and capitulation to Cleomenes, it would prefer to secure the cause of democracy even at the price of submission to Persia. The first chapter of the long and squalid history of medism had been written. In after times, when the glories of Marathon and Salamis had obscured so much of the earlier history, it was easy for Athenian orators and historians to charge Aegina or Thebes with having set the example of seeking support from the Persian king. For all that, the fact remains, and it is a fact that should never be forgotten, that the first Greek statesman to invoke the intervention of Persia in the politics of Greece itself was none other than the founder of the Athenian democracy.

Cleisthenes had calculated that, when the envoys returned from their mission with the good news that the support of Persia had been secured, a Peloponnesian army under Cleomenes would be on the frontiers of Attica. As it proved, however, the danger had passed away when the envoys returned, and it was easy to denounce their act of betrayal, when the force which had advanced under the two Spartan kings Cleomenes and Demaratus as far as Eleusis had retired into the Peloponnese without striking a blow. But if the expedition had failed, it was not the fault of the military dispositions of Cleomenes. His strategy was masterly. Attica was to be invaded from three sides: from the Peloponnese, from Boeotia, and from Euboea. While the Peloponnesian army advanced from the Isthmus, the Boeotians were to invade Attica from the north, and the Chalcidians were to cross the Euripus and deliver their attack from that direction. For the hostility of Chaicis an explanation may perhaps be found in the perennial rivalry of that state with its neighbour Eretria, the ancient ally of Athens. The hostility of Boeotia is easier to account for. Some­thing like a dozen years earlier in 519 bc the town of Plataea, which stood on a spur of Cithaeron not far from the Athenian border, had seceded from the Boeotian League and had sought an alliance with Sparta.The Spartans advised the Plataeans to place themselves under the protection of Athens rather than that of Sparta, with the result that Athens incurred the lasting enmity of Thebes.

In the presence of an invasion from three sides at once, the Athenians could not hesitate as to the front on which the defence must be made first. Herodotus’ statement that they ad­vanced against the Peloponnesian force which had already reached Eleusis may reasonably be interpreted as meaning that the Athenian army took up a defensive position on the ridge of Mt Aegaleos which separated the Pedion or Plain of Athens from the Thriasian Plain in which Eleusis lay. Meanwhile dissensions had broken out in the Peloponnesian army, and Cleomenes found that he had a two-fold opposition to deal with, that of the Corinthians who refused to take any further part in the invasion of Attica and drew off with their whole force and that of his colleague Demaratus who supported the action of the Corinthians. The rest of the Peloponnesian army, encouraged by the quarrel of the two Spartan kings, were not slow in following the example of the Corinthians. The invasion ended in a fiasco.

What was the motive of the Corinthians? The answer that is commonly given is based on the support given by Corinth to Athens in the Aeginetan War. It is assumed that the motive of Corinth was purely commercial, and it is argued that, as Aegina was at the time a more serious rival to Corinthian trade than Athens, Corinth was unwilling to see the power of Athens weakened. It may well be doubted whether this reasoning is sound. The policy of Corinth was not always determined by commercial motives, and it is hazardous to conclude that either Corinth was hostile to Aegina, or Aegina hostile to Athens in 507 bc because something like twenty years later (the true date of the Aeginetan War), Aegina was the rival of Corinth and the enemy of Athens. Still more hazardous is it to argue that the decision of the Corinthians in favour of Plataea in 519 bc must have been prompted by the same desire to strengthen Athens against Aegina. A passage in Xenophon, which refers to the action of the Corinthians in refusing to support Lysander in his attempt to restore the oligarchy at Athens in 403, suggests a different explanation. Corinth was ready to support Sparta, so long as Spartan hegemony was confined to the Peloponnese, but Corinth had no wish to see Sparta supreme on both sides of the Isthmus. The mere geographical position of Corinth might seem to have marked her out as the exponent of the doctrine of a Balance of Power.

There still remained the Boeotian and Chalcidian armies to be dealt with. The former had occupied Hysiae, which although it lay outside Attica proper, was in the territory of Plataea and therefore in alliance with Athens, and had advanced as far as Oenoe, an important position well to the south of Mt Cithaeron. The Athenians, instead of attacking the Boeotian force, which was the nearer of the two, marched against the Chalcidians, in the direction of the Euripus. The movement had the result that was doubtless intended; it compelled the Boeotians to evacuate Attica and hasten with all speed to the support of the Chalcidians. No sooner did the Athenians get news of the retirement of the Boeotians than they turned and attacked them on their line of march before they had effected a junction with their allies on the Euripus. It is probable that the Boeotians were taken by surprise; at any rate the victory of the Athenians was decisive and no less than 700 prisoners were taken. The action must have been fought not far from the Euripus, for on the same day the Athenians crossed into Euboea and there won a second and even moredecisive victory, over the Chalcidians. That two such victories should have been won on the same day argues a commander of some military skill on the Athenian side; yet Herodotus cannot tell us his name. He must have held the office of Polemarch, but that his name should be unknown is a signal example of the fragmentary character of our knowledge, even of Athenian history at this period. It is clear from the narrative that the number of Chalcidian prisoners taken in the engagement was considerable, and they as well as those captured from the Boeotians were kept in prison at Athens until they were ransomed. The chains in which the prisoners had been fettered were preserved on the Acropolis where they were seen by Herodotus, and from a tithe of the ransom the Athenians dedicated to the goddess Athena a bronze chariot. The victory was commemorated in an inscription which speaks of the gloomy iron chains in which the Athenians quenched the insolence of their foes and of the bitter bondage in which they were kept fettered.

As we are told that their captivity lasted a long while, peace cannot have been concluded either with Chalcis or Thebes immediately after the double victory. It is probable that Chalcis was the first to make peace with Athens. The terms dictated to her were sufficiently harsh, as she had to cede to Athens the most fertile part of her territory hitherto occupied by the Hippobotae, the aristocracy of Chalcis. On this territory what was probably the first cleruchy in Athenian history was planted; if Herodotus is to be believed, the cleruchs numbered four thousand. More will be said in a later volume to point out that the cleruchy was a colony of a peculiar kind, resembling the Roman colonia rather than the ordinary Greek apoikia that the colonists, or cleruchs as they were called, retained their Athenian citizenship and even their membership of tribe and deme; and that the cleruchy served a double purpose—the economic purpose of providing land for the poorer citizens and the military purpose of establishing a garrison in a position of strategic importance. The cleruchy at Chaicis was to be the first of a long series of such settlements.

It would be difficult to over-estimate the consequences of these successes of the Athenians against so formidable a combination. The policy of Cleomenes had suffered shipwreck, and Athenian troops had proved their superiority in the field over two neigh­bouring states, Boeotia and Chaicis. It was these successes that inspired the new-born democracy with self-confidence and it was their glamour which as much as any other one factor helps to explain the century of democratic government which Athens was to enjoy. It must be admitted that the defeat of the Boeotians is not easy to explain. The history of the next two centuries was to prove the quality of the Boeotian infantry. We can only suppose that at this epoch Thebes received half-hearted support from the other towns of Boeotia. Boeotia was not so ready as Chalcis to make peace with Athens, and Thebes was naturally anxious to avenge her defeat. As no further help could be expected from Sparta it was to Aegina, at that time the first naval power in Greece, that Thebes turned for help. An invasion from the north combined with an attack by sea from Aegina on the south might prove fatal to the new government at Athens. The means adopted by Thebes to secure this end were characteristic of the age. An oracle, couched in terms of appropriate obscurity, was obtained from Delphi. The Thebans were told ‘to seek the aid of those nearest them.’ It needed little ingenuity to interpret: ‘those nearest them’ in the light of the legend which made the nymphs Thebe and Aegina sisters and to base the appeal of Aegina on the mythological kinship of the two states. The answer of Aegina to this appeal is not less characteristic. Aegina had reasons of her own for not wishing to precipitate a conflict with Athens. Her answer to the appeal of Thebes was to send them the AcTcidae or sons of Aeacus, that is, the images of the tutelary deities of the island. That this meant a refusal of the alliance can scarcely be doubted. The diplomatic fictions of the modern world are borrowed from Law, those of the sixth century bc were borrowed from Religion. The grounds of the appeal were mythological, the assistance sent belonged to the same order of ideas. It need not surprise us that the Thebans sent back the Aeacidae with the explanation that what they had asked was aid of a more material nature. A formal peace must have been concluded between Athens and Boeotia not long after this, although it is impossible to assign the precise date. It has been suggested that the district of Oropus, which is subsequently found in the possession of Athens, although it never formed a part of Attica proper, may have been acquired by the terms of this peace.

A year or two later, Cleomenes made one more attempt to crush the Athenian democracy and to undo the work of Cleisthenes. This time he summoned a congress of the Peloponnesian League at Sparta, and laid before it the proposal to restore Hippias as tyrant of Athens. This meeting of the congress at Sparta was regarded by Grote as marking an epoch in the history of the Peloponnesian League. It is undoubtedly the first recorded meeting of the League but we have no warrant for the assumption that it was the first meeting to be held. The action of Cleomenes implied a complete reversal of his previous policy in regard to Athens. It was Cleomenes who had expelled Hippias and who had lent his whole support to Isagoras, the leader of the aristocratic party. It is true that Herodotus attributes to Cleomenes on the occasion of his last invasion of Attica the design of setting up Isagoras as tyrant, but the word ‘tyrant’ need not be pressed; it may perhaps be used in a loose and rhetorical sense. Hippias, however, was to be restored as ‘tyrant’ in the strict and proper sense of the term, and no change of policy could well be more startling. The ultimate object of the proposed restoration of Hippias was, of course, identical with the ultimate object of the attempt to restore Isagoras. It was the aim of Cleomenes on the one occasion and the other to establish at Athens a government subservient to Sparta. Once more the opposition was led by Corinth and once more it was successful. Herodotus’ statement that it was Sosicles (or Socles) who was the Corinthian spokesman may be accepted as true, but the long speech which he puts into his mouth is clearly the outcome of the historian’s imagination. The proposal was rejected. In any case, it could have found little favour with the representatives of the philo-Laconian oligarchies which were in power in the great majority of the states included in the League. It looked as if the failure of Cleomenes’ policy was now irretrievable. The Athenian democracy could at length breathe freely.

V

THE ARGIVE WAR

Cleomenes laid the lesson of his failure to heart. It was idle for him to attempt to extend the hegemony of Sparta to Greece north of the Isthmus so long as Sparta was not mistress in her own house; so long, that is, as there was a rival claimant for the hegemony of the Peloponnese itself. Sparta had wrested from Argos the border district of Cynuria half a century before this, but Argos still cherished the memory of her ancient supremacy, and she was still a possible head of an anti­Laconian confederacy. In view of the open threat of Corinthian secession to Argos at the Congress of 432 bc on the eve of the Peloponnesian War, and of the intrigues of Corinth to form an anti-Laconian alliance after the Peace of Nicias, it is tempting to explain the success of her opposition to the policy of Cleomenes, in the field at Eleusis as well as in the Council Chamber at Sparta, by the presence in the Peloponnese of a rival claimant to the hegemony. To Cleomenes it was evident that the destruction of the power of Argos was the indispensable condition of the recog­nition of Spartan supremacy in Greece as a whole. But it was not enough that Argos should be crushed; she must be crushed by a purely Spartan army. Sparta must prove to her Peloponnesian allies that she could achieve her object without their aid.

It is here assumed that the date of Cleomenes’ invasion of Argos is c. 494 bc. As happens so frequently in the history of Greece, and that not merely in centuries earlier than the fifth, our whole view of the meaning of an event turns on its determination of its date. Two dates have been suggested for the Argive War— c. 520 and c. 494 bc, but fortunately there can be little doubt as to which is to be preferred. The only argument for the earlier date that carries any weight is the statement of Pausanias that Cleomenes’ invasion of Argos was at the beginning of his reign. Against this statement of Pausanias are to be set two arguments each in its way conclusive. The first of these is based on Herodotus’ statement that the oracle given from Delphi to the Argives when the war with Sparta was impending was given at the same time and on the same occasion as an oracle to Miletus which, on grounds of internal evidence, can only be dated to the interval between the Battle of Lade and the Fall of Miletus (c. 494). Herodotus’ statement has been called in question, but an oracle given on the same occasion to different states is unique in the records of the Delphic Oracle, and inventors are prone to invent not the unique but the commonplace. The second argument is derived from the excuse pleaded by the Argives for their neutrality at the time of the invasion of Xerxes that their defeat by Cleomenes had been recent. While 494 BC may fairly be called recent from the point of view of 481, it is incredible that the Argives could have alleged as an excuse the loss of life incurred in a defeat which had occurred forty years before.

It was evident that the whole effort of Sparta must be concentrated on the conflict with Argos, which was to determine the position of Sparta in the Greek world. Hence the appeal (498 bc) of Aristagoras met with no response. In view of the previous assertion of Spartan claims in Ionia, it might have been expected that Sparta would have given some support to the cause of the Eastern Greeks; but to have sent Spartan troops across the seas when the issue at home was so soon to be decided would have been little short of suicidal.

Almost all would admit that Herodotus is not seen at his best as a military historian. Of the art of war and of the principles of strategy he has little understanding. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in his account of Cleomenes’ invasion of the Argive territory and of the victory of Sepeia. Yet the data recorded by Herodotus enable us to arrive at some tolerably certain conclusions. The army which Cleomenes commanded was a purely Lacedaemonian force; it was clear that no contingents from the other Peloponnesian states were engaged. The direct route to Argos ran up the valley of the Oenus to Sellasia; from this point it led across the mountainous district of Cynuria and reached the sea at Thyrea, whence it followed the coast of the Argolic Gulf to Argos itself. It was by this route that Cleomenes advanced as far as the river Erasinus about three miles from the city of Argos. On the pretext that the omens were unfavourable for the passage of the stream, he led his troops back again to Thyrea, whence he shipped them across the Gulf to Nauplia. Having landed them here, he advanced on Argos as far as Tiryns about four or five miles from Argos. The fact that he had collected a fleet composed of Aeginetan and Sicyonian vessels which lay in readiness at Thyrea for the transport of his troops across the Gulf to Nauplia proves conclusively that we are dealing with a carefully thought out plan of campaign and that the advance to the Erasinus was a mere feint, designed to mislead the Argives as to the direction from which his real attack would be delivered.

The battle between the two armies was fought at a place called Sepeia in the neighbourhood of Tiryns. The victory won by Cleomenes was one of the most decisive recorded in the history of Greece and one of the most momentous in its consequences. The total loss of the Argives is put by Herodotus at 6000; an extraordinarily high number according to Greek standards. Argos itself escaped capture, and Cleomenes on his return home was brought to trial by the ephors for his failure to take the city. It may be that he distrusted the skill of the Spartans in siege operations; it is more probable that it was part of his policy to spare the city. It may be conjectured that his policy differed from that of the ephors. Their policy was inspired by blind insensate hate; it aimed at the destruction of the city and the incorporation of its territory in that of Sparta. Cleomenes realised that Sparta stood to gain more by having as its neighbour an enfeebled Argos, governed by a philo-Laconian oligarchy, than by the capture and destruction of the city. It is certain that the destruction of Argos would have been fatal to the moral ascendancy of Sparta in the Greek world. Sepeia is in one respect unique in Greek warfare down to the Persian Wars. We have been taught in the modern world to regard victory in the field as a means to an end, that end being the destruction of the enemy’s force. To the Greeks a battle was in the nature of a duel; it was an agon, in which honour was satisfied and the pursuit ceased when the enemy acknowledged defeat by asking for a truce for the burial of his dead. At Sepeia the Argive army was annihilated and Argos, as a military power, put out of action for a generation. Upon the position of Sparta both in the Peloponnese and in the rest of Greece the effects of the victory were immediate. All opposition to Sparta within the Peloponnesian League died down, and three or four years later Athens in her appeal against Aegina virtually conceded to Sparta a supremacy in the Greek political system as great as any that Sparta had ever claimed for herself. The acquittal of Cleomenes when, brought to trial by the ephors proved that his policy had commended itself to the public opinion of Sparta. It was Cleomenes—not the ephors—who governed now.

VI

POLITICAL PARTIES AT ATHENS FROM THE REFORM OF CLEISTHENES TO THE YEAR 491 BC

To write a history of political parties at Athens, and of the relations of the party leaders to one another, is a task of some difficulty. Our available data are scanty, and Herodotus, our primary authority for these years, shows little insight into the political situation of each successive phase, and it may be surmised that the traditions which he follows were far from impartial. In any attempt to solve the problems which are presented to us, there are certain considerations which must be kept in view. In the first place we must be on our guard against anachron­isms. On the one hand we have no right to assume that the local factions of the Coast, the Plain, and the Hill-country which were the determining factor in Athenian politics in the middle of the sixth century bc had the same importance at the beginning of the next century; on the other, it must be remembered that the rivalry of the Clans is a factor of far more importance than was the case fifty years later. Secondly it is impossible to understand the internal politics of Athens apart from the foreign relations of the state. Throughout this period we must keep our eyes fixed on the far side of the Aegean. When the vital question of the hour is a question of foreign policy, when the very existence of a nation is at stake, political combinations may be effected which would be inconceivable at other times and in other circumstances.

It has been argued above that Cleisthenes must bear the full responsibility for the embassy to Sardes, and for the instructions given to the envoys. The version of the story which we have in Herodotus lays stress on the disgrace of the envoys. His language is vague. We should like to know what lies behind the phrase ‘They fell into deep disgrace’. Were they fined, or exiled, or put to death? Still more should we like to know what were the consequences for Cleisthenes himself. He is said to have been the first victim of his law of ostracism, but the authority for this is late and poor; yet the passage in Herodotus looks like a deliberate attempt to conceal the disgrace of the leader of the Alcmaeonid party, and few things in Athenian history are more inexplicable than the sudden disappearance of Cleisthenes from the scene. Two or three years later a second embassy was sent to Sardes, after the failure of Cleomenes to induce the Congress of the Peloponnesian League to restore the tyranny at Athens. Hippias had retired to Sigeum on the Asiatic side of the entrance to the Hellespont and was sparing no effort to secure the support of Artaphrenes, the satrap at Sardes. The menace to Athens was grave, and the answer that the envoys received was in the form of an ultimatum; Hippias must be restored. The story as told by Herodotus presents great difficulties. A couple of years before, the Athenian Assembly had repudiated the action of the envoys in giving earth and water to Darius. It is hard to conceive of a more deliberate affront to the majesty of the Great King. How could the Athenian people imagine that, under these circumstances, its efforts to detach Persia from the cause of Hippias would be successful? Or how could the envoys have obtained an audience of the satrap, unless they were empowered to offer earth and water? The return of the embassy with the Persian ultimatum marks a stage in the history of political parties at Athens. Up to this point, the Alcmaeonidae might be called the medizing party, in the sense that they were prepared to accept the intervention of Persia, if the democracy could thereby be secured. Henceforward there could be but one party at Athens which in the strict and proper sense of the term deserved to be called ‘the Medizers’—the party of Hippias. For the Alcmaeonidae to have accepted Persian intervention on Persian terms would have been to commit political suicide, for the Persian terms now meant the restoration of the tyranny. The curtain falls, and for the next half dozen years we are not vouchsafed so much as a glimpse of the internal history of Athens.

It is not until the embassy of Aristagoras in 498 BC that the curtain is once more raised. There are three facts to be taken into account in this connection. A fleet is sent to the aid of the Ionians; it consists of only 20 vessels; and it is recalled on the first reverse to the cause of the insurgents. Evidently, parties in the Assembly are so nicely balanced that while the one side has a majority for sending help, the other side succeeds in cutting down the number of vessels while the retreat from Sardes and the defeat at Ephesus are sufficient to secure the triumph of the anti-Ionian party. The fundamentum divisionis is the Ionian question; the two alternatives presented to the Assembly were the sending, or refusing, aid to Aristagoras. But which of the parties that have been distinguished above voted for this alternative or that? There can be no question as to the attitude of the Peisistratid faction; it must have voted against and not for the sending of help to the Ionians. But yet it cannot have constituted so large a proportion of the citizen body that without the aid of any other party it could procure both the reduction in the number of the vessels and the recall of the fleet. Clearly there was a coalition, and the only party with whom common action on this question of foreign policy can be assumed is that of the Alcmaeonidae. Nothing is more probable than that the party which had originally invited the intervention of Persia and which was in such close touch with Sardes should deprecate action which could only tend to exasperate the Persian Court. On the other side must have been found the party once led by Isagoras, the party of the aristocrats— the old allies of Sparta and the bitter enemies alike of the Peisis- tratidae and the Alcmaeonidae.

Two years later, in the spring of 496 bc, the anti-Ionian party is strong enough to carry its candidate, Hipparchus the son of Charmus, a cousin of Hippias, in the election to the archonship, which is still the chief executive office in the state. The evidence of a coalition is here irresistible. Can it seriously be maintained that the supporters of the exiled tyrant, fourteen years after the fall of the dynasty, could have carried their candidate by the mere votes of their own party? Once more the Alcmaeonidae must have felt themselves constrained to fall into line with their old rivals. But the coalition in itself hardly explains a success so surprising. In order to understand it, the fortunes of the Ionic Revolt must be taken into’account. By the beginning of 496 bc the insurrection in Cyprus had been crushed; Persian columns were advancing down the river valleys to the shores of the Propontis and Aegean; the Hellespontine region was being reduced, and two of the cities on the western coast, Cyme and Clazomenae, had been recovered. Aristagoras had fallen in Thrace, and the ultimate issue of the revolt was no longer doubtful. To many at Athens who were attached neither to the Peisistratid nor to the Alcmaeonid faction it may well have seemed that the sending of the twenty ships to the aid of the Ionians had been a gigantic blunder and that the only course open to Athens was to make the best terms that she could with Persia. Within the next two years two events had happened, the defeat of the Ionian fleet at Lade and the reduction of Miletus, the last stronghold of the insurgents, which combined to produce a profound revulsion of feeling at Athens, and a complete change of policy. Grote has aptly compared the sentiment excited throughout the Greek world by the fate of Miletus to the thrill of horror which ran through Protestant Europe on the news of the Sack of Magdeburg by Tilly in the Thirty Years’ War. Nowhere can this sentiment have been more intense than at Athens.

At this crisis a new party emerges into view in Athenian politics and a new party leader is introduced to us. It is the first appear­ance on the scene of Themistocles, one of the two most famous statesmen in Athenian history. Themistocles was a novus homo, it is even said that he was of foreign origin on his mother’s side. The interests for which he worked were those of the town rather than of the country—of the trading and industrial classes, of those above all who ‘occupied their business in great waters.’ The future of Athens to which he looked was its future as a commercial and maritime power. The party which he had gathered round him must have been largely drawn from the very class to which Cleisthenes appealed. Themistocles must have succeeded in detaching from the party of the Alcmaeonidae a large section of the newly enfranchised citizens by the aid of whose votes Cleisthenes had carried his reforms. It may well have been the medizing policy of Cleisthenes that cost his party the support of this interest. If the party was in existence at the time of the embassy of Aristagoras, it cannot be doubted that Themistocles would have been one of the strongest supporters of the Ionian cause. In the year 493 he was elected archon, and during his term of office, from midsummer 493 to midsummer 492, he planned and partly carried out the creation of a new naval harbour at the Piraeus which was to take the place of the open roadstead at Phalerum which had hitherto sufficed for the needs of the Athenian fleet.

To the same year 493 are almost certainly to be assigned two other events of first-rate importance in their bearing on the party politics of Athens at this period—the first trial of Miltiades and the prosecution of the poet Phrynichus for the production of his tragedy, the Sack of Miletus. It was apparently in this year that Miltiades arrived in Athens on his flight from the Thracian Chersonese, and immediately on his return he was brought to trial ‘by his enemies’ before a Heliastic Court, on the charge of having been a tyrant in the Chersonese. It may be presumed that ‘his enemies’ were identical with his prosecutors in his second trial after the Parian expedition; that is, that they were the Alcmaeonidae, the great rivals of the Clan of the Philaidae of which Miltiades was the head. During his absence in the Chersonese the Philaidae must have counted for little at Athens. But their influence was likely to revive with the return of their leader, and the Alcmaeonidae were resolved to achieve his political ruin before he became dangerous. The charge on which he was brought to trial implies that there was an Athenian colony and Athenian citizens somewhere in the Chersonese, presumably at Sestos. It cannot have been an offence known to the Athenian law for an individual Athenian to exercise despotic authority over barbarians; there must have been Athenian citizens in the Cher­sonese whose rights had been impaired by the rule of Miltiades.

The charge was almost certainly well-founded, for the nar­rative in Herodotus, while it insists on the enmity between the house of Miltiades and that of Peisistratus, discloses the fact that Miltiades himself was sent out to the Chersonese by the Peisistratidae in a vessel of war. He must, therefore, in the first instance, have ruled there as the deputy of the tyrants. He was now a fugitive from the power of Persia, and his impeachment must have been supported by the partisans of Hippias, by whom he would be viewed as a renegade. Yet he was acquitted, and acquitted at the very moment when the influence of Themistocles was at its height. Can it be doubted that, if Themistocles had used his influence against Miltiades, the latter would have been condemned? Is it not then a certain inference that in the presence of the Persian menace Themistocles, although the leader of the popular party, made common cause with Miltiades, the leader of the aristocratic party, in much the same way as in the presence of the Irish menace, Mr Chamberlain, the author of the ‘unauthorized programme,’ made common cause with Lord Salisbury, the Tory chief, or as in the presence of the German menace in 1914, the leader of the Belgian Socialists made common cause with the leader of the Catholics? Themistocles can hardly have failed to see in Miltiades a heaven-sent general against the Persians.

It is almost certain, too, that in the production of Phrynichus’ drama we may trace the hand of Themistocles. Who so likely as he, ‘who was of all men the best able to extemporize the right thing to be done,’ to hit upon the idea of employing the tragic stage for the purposes of political propaganda? The object of the play can only have been to bring home to an Athenian audience the guilt of those who were responsible for the withdrawal of the Athenian ships and the abandonment of the Ionian cause. The fact recorded by Plutarch that The­mistocles in the year 476—5 dedicated a tablet to commemorate his having acted as Choregus to Phrynichus, when the latter was awarded the prize in the tragic contest, affords more than a presumption of some connection between the statesman and the dramatist. The prosecution must have proceeded from the leaders of the anti-Ionian parties. Possibly the charge was one of impiety, on the ground that a contemporary event had been chosen as the subject of the play in place of one taken from myth or legend as was prescribed by immemorial usage. If this conjecture is correct we have in the prosecution of Phrynichus an anticipation of the attacks upon Pheidias and Anaxagoras which were designed to undermine the ascendancy of Pericles. The prosecution was so far successful that Phrynichus was fined 1000 drachmae and the representation of the play upon the stage was forbidden for the future; it failed, however, to affect the popularity of Themistocles. That he should have carried his proposal for the new naval base at the Piraeus, and that he should have been able to make some progress with the scheme, prove that his influence remained undiminished until he laid down office in the middle of the year 492 bc.

CHAPTER VII

THE REIGN OF DARIUS