XII. SOLON THE LAWGIVER…

XII. SOLON THE LAWGIVER

[Sidenote: [594-593 B.C.]]

It is on the occasion of Solon’s legislation that we obtain our first glimpse--only a glimpse, unfortunately--of the actual state of Attica and its inhabitants. It is a sad and repulsive picture, presenting to us political discord and private suffering combined.

Violent dissensions prevailed among the inhabitants of Attica, who were separated into three factions--the pedicis, or men of the plain, comprising Athens, Eleusis, and the neighbouring territory, among whom the greatest number of rich families were included; the mountaineers in the east and north of Attica, called diacrii, who were on the whole the poorest party; and the paralii in the southern portion of Attica from sea to sea, whose means and social position were intermediate between the two. Upon what particular points these intestine disputes turned we are not distinctly informed; they were not however peculiar to the period immediately preceding the archontate of Solon; they had prevailed before, and they reappear afterwards prior to the despotism of Pisistratus, the latter standing forward as the leader of the diacrii, and as champion, real or pretended, of the poorer population.

But in the time of Solon these intestine quarrels were aggravated by something much more difficult to deal with--a general mutiny of the poorer population against the rich, resulting from misery combined with oppression. The Thetes, whose condition we have already contemplated in the poems of Homer and Hesiod, are now presented to us as forming the bulk of the population of Attica--the cultivating tenants, metayers, and small proprietors of the country. They are exhibited as weighed down by debts and dependence, and driven in large numbers out of a state of freedom into slavery--the whole mass of them (we are told) being in debt to the rich, who were proprietors of the greater part of the soil. They had either borrowed money for their own necessities, or they tilled the lands of the rich as dependent tenants, paying a stipulated portion of the produce, and in this capacity they were largely in arrear.

All the calamitous effects were here seen of the old harsh law of debtor and creditor,--once prevalent in Greece, Italy, Asia, and a large portion of the world,--combined with the recognition of slavery as a legitimate status, and of the right of one man to sell himself as well as that of another man to buy him. Every debtor unable to fulfil his contract was liable to be adjudged as the slave of his creditor until he could find means either of paying or working it out; and not only he himself, but his minor sons and unmarried daughters and sisters also, whom the law gave him the power of selling. The poor man thus borrowed upon the security of his body, to translate literally the Greek phrase, and upon that of the persons in his family; and so severely had these oppressive contracts been enforced, that many debtors had been reduced from freedom to slavery in Attica itself, many others had been sold for exportation, and some had only hitherto preserved their own freedom by selling their children. Moreover, a great number of the smaller properties in Attica were under mortgage, signified, according to the formality usual in the Attic law, and continued down throughout the historical times, by a stone pillar erected on the land, inscribed with the name of the lender and the amount of the loan. The proprietors of these mortgaged lands, in case of an unfavourable turn of events, had no other prospect except that of irremediable slavery for themselves and their families, either in their own native country, robbed of all its delights, or in some barbarian region where the Attic accent would never meet their ears. Some had fled the country to escape legal adjudication of their persons, and earned a miserable subsistence in foreign parts by degrading occupations. Upon several, too, this deplorable lot had fallen by unjust condemnation and corrupt judges; the conduct of the rich, in regard to money sacred and profane, in regard to matters public as well as private, being thoroughly unprincipled and rapacious.

The manifold and long-continued suffering of the poor under this system, plunged into a state of debasement not more tolerable than that of the Gallic plebs--and the injustices of the rich in whom all political power was then vested--are facts well attested by the poems of Solon himself, even in the short fragments preserved to us, and it appears that immediately preceding the time of his archonship, the evils had ripened to such a point and the determination of the mass of sufferers, to extort for themselves some mode of relief, had become so pronounced that the existing laws could no longer be enforced. According to the profound remark of Aristotle, that seditions are generated by great causes but out of small incidents, we may conceive that some recent events had occurred as immediate stimulants to the outbreak of the debtors--like those which lend so striking an interest to the early Roman annals, as the inflaming sparks of violent popular movements for which the train had long before been laid. Condemnations by the archons of insolvent debtors may have been unusually numerous, or the maltreatment of some particular debtor, once a respected freeman, in his condition of slavery, may have been brought to act vividly upon the public sympathies--like the case of the old plebeian centurion at Rome (first impoverished by the plunder of the enemy, then reduced to borrow, and lastly adjudged to his creditor as an insolvent), who claimed the protection of the people in the forum, rousing their feelings to the highest pitch by the marks of the slave-whip visible on his person. Some such incidents had probably happened, though we have no historians to recount them; moreover it is not unreasonable to imagine, that that public mental affliction which the purifier Epimenides had been invoked to appease, as it sprung in part from pestilence, so it had its cause partly in years of sterility, which must of course have aggravated the distress of the small cultivators. However this may be, such was the condition of things in 594 B.C., through mutiny of the poor freemen and Thetes, and uneasiness of the middling citizens, that the governing oligarchy, unable either to enforce their private debts or to maintain their political power, were obliged to invoke the well-known wisdom and integrity of Solon. Though his vigorous protest (which doubtless rendered him acceptable to the mass of the people) against the iniquity of the existing system, had already been proclaimed in his poems, they still hoped that he would serve as an auxiliary to help them over their difficulties, and they therefore chose him, nominally as archon along with Philombrotus, but with power in substance dictatorial.[b]

For the life of Solon we can do no better than turn to Plutarch, keeping the very translation, by North, that Shakespeare read, but modernising the spelling.

THE LIFE AND LAWS OF SOLON ACCORDING TO PLUTARCH

[Sidenote: [ca. 638-558 B.C.]]

He was of the noblest and most ancient house of the city of Athens. For of his father’s side, he was descended of King Codrus: and for his mother, Heraclides Ponticus writeth, she was cousin-german unto Pisistratus’ mother. For this cause even from the beginning there was great friendship between them, partly for their kindred, and partly also for the courtesy and beauty of Pisistratus, with whom it is reported Solon on a time was in love. But Solon’s father (as Hermippus writeth) having spent his goods in liberality, and deeds of courtesy, though he might easily have been relieved at divers men’s hands with money, he was yet ashamed to take any, because he came of a house which was wont rather to give and relieve others, than to take themselves: so being yet a young man, he devised to trade merchandise. Howbeit others say, that Solon travelled countries, rather to see the world, and to learn, than to traffic, or gain. For sure he was very desirous of knowledge, as appeareth manifestly: for that being now old, he commonly used to say this verse:

“I grow old learning still.”

Also he was not covetously bent, nor loved riches too much: for he said in one place:

“Whoso hath goods, and gold enough at call, Great herds of beasts, and flocks in many a fold; Both horse and mule, yea, store of corn and all That may content each man above the mould: No richer is, for all those heaps and hoards, Than he which hath sufficiently to feed And clothe his corpse with such as God affords. But if his joy and chief delight do breed, For to behold the fair and heavenly face Of some sweet wife, which is adorned with grace: Or else some child, of beauty fair and bright, Then hath he cause (indeed) of deep delight.”

And in another place also he saith:

“Indeed I do desire some wealth to have at will: But not unless the same be got by faithful dealing still. For sure who so desires by wickedness to thrive, Shall find that justice from such goods will justly him deprive.”

Solon learned to be lavish in expense, to fare delicately, and to speak wantonly of pleasures in his poems, somewhat more licentiously than became the gravity of a philosopher: only because he was brought up in the trade of merchandise, wherein for that men are marvellous subject to great losses and dangers, they seek other whiles good cheer to drive these cares away, and liberty to make much of themselves. Poetry at the beginning he used but for pleasure, and when he had leisure, writing no matter of importance in his verses. Afterwards he set out many grave matters of philosophy, and the most part of such things as he had devised before, in the government of a commonweal, which he did not for history or memory’s sake, but only of a pleasure to discourse: for he showeth the reasons of that he did, and in some places he exhorteth, chideth, and reproveth the Athenians. And some affirm also he went about to write his laws and ordinances in verse, and do recite his preface, which was this:

“Vouchsafe, O mighty Jove, of heaven and earth high king: To grant good fortune to my laws and hests in everything. And that their glory grow in such triumphant wise, As may remain in fame for aye, which lives and never dies.”

[Sidenote: [594-590 B.C.]]

He chiefly delighted in moral philosophy, which treated of government and commonweals: as the most part of the wise men did of those times. But for natural philosophy, he was very gross and simple. So in effect there was none but Thales alone of all the seven wise men of Greece, who searched further the contemplation of things in common use among men, than he. For setting him apart, all the others got the name of wisdom, only for their understanding in matters of State and government. It is reported that they met on a day all seven together in the city of Delphes, and another time in the city of Corinth, where Periander got them together at a feast that he made to the other six.

Anacharsis being arrived at Athens, went to knock at Solon’s gate, saying that he was a stranger which came of purpose to see him, and to desire his acquaintance and friendship. Solon answered him, that it was better to seek friendship in his own country. Anacharsis replied again: “Thou then that art at home, and in thine own country, begin to show me friendship.” Then Solon wondering at his bold ready wit, entertained him very courteously: and kept him a certain time in his house, and made him very good cheer, at the self-same time wherein he was most busy in governing the commonweal, and making laws for the state thereof. Which when Anacharsis understood, he laughed at it, to see that Solon imagined with written laws, to bridle men’s covetousness and injustice. “For such laws,” said he, “do rightly resemble the spider’s cobwebs: because they take hold of little flies and gnats which fall into them, but the rich and mighty will break and run through them at their will.” Solon answered him, that men do justly keep all covenants and bargains which one makes with another, because it is to the hindrance of either party to break them: and even so, he did so temper his laws, that he made his citizens know, it was more for their profit to obey law and justice, than to break it. Nevertheless afterwards, matters proved rather according to Anacharsis’ comparison, than agreeable to the hope that Solon had conceived. Anacharsis being by hap one day in a common assembly of the people at Athens, said that he marvelled much, why in the consultations and meetings of the Grecians, wise men propounded matters, and fools did decide them.

The Athenians, having sustained a long and troublesome war against the Megarians, for the possession of the isle of Salamis, were in the end weary of it, and made proclamation straightly commanding upon pain of death, that no man should presume to prefer any more to the counsel of the city, the title or question of the possession of the isle of Salamis. Solon could not bear this open shame, and seeing the most part of the lustiest youths desirous still of war, though their tongues were tied for fear of the proclamation; he feigned himself to be out of his wits, and caused it to be given out that Solon was become a fool; and secretly he had made certain lamentable verses, which he had conned without book, to sing abroad the city. So one day he ran suddenly out of his house with a garland on his head, and got him to the market-place, where the people straight swarmed like bees about him: and getting him up upon the stone where all proclamations are usually made out he singeth the elegies he had made.

This elegy is entitled Salamis, and containeth an hundred verses, which are excellently well written. And these being sung openly by Solon at that time, his friends incontinently praised them beyond measure, and especially Pisistratus: and they went about persuading the people that were present, to credit that he spake. Hereupon the matter was so handled amongst them, that by and by the proclamation was revoked, and they began to follow the wars with greater fury than before, appointing Solon to be general in the same.

But the common tale and report is, that he went by sea with Pisistratus unto the temple of Venus, surnamed Colias: where he found all the women at a solemn feast and sacrifice, which they made of custom to the goddess. He taking occasion thereby, sent from thence a trusty man of his own unto the Megarians, which then had Salamis: whom he instructed to feign himself a revolted traitor, and that he came of purpose to tell them, that if they would but go with him, they might take all the chief ladies and gentlewomen of Athens on a sudden. The Megarians easily believed him, and shipped forthwith certain soldiers to go with him. But when Solon perceived the ship under sail coming from Salamis, he commanded the women to depart, and instead of them he put lusty beardless springalls into their apparel, and gave them little short daggers to convey under their clothes, commanding them to play and dance together upon the seaside, until their enemies were landed, and their ship at anchor; and so it came to pass. For the Megarians being deceived by that they saw afar off, as soon as ever they came to the shore side did land in heaps, one in another’s neck, even for greediness, to take these women: but not a man of them escaped, for they were slain every mother’s son. This stratagem being finely handled, and to good effect, the Athenians took sea straight, and coasted over to the isle of Salamis: which they took upon the sudden, and won it without much resistance.

Others say that it was not taken after this sort: By order of the oracle, Solon one night passed over to Salamis, and did sacrifice to Periphemus, and to Cychreus, demi-gods of the country. Which done, the Athenians delivered him five hundred men, who willingly offered themselves: and the city made an accord with them: that if they took the isle of Salamis, they should bear greatest authority in the commonweal. Solon embarked his soldiers into divers fisher boats, and appointed a galliot of thirty oars to come after him, and he anchored hard by the city of Salamis, under the point which looketh towards the isle of Negropont. The Megarians which were within Salamis, having by chance heard some inkling of it, but yet knew nothing of certainty: ran presently in hurly-burly to arm them, and manned out a ship to descry what it was. But they fondly coming within danger, were taken by Solon, who clapped the Megarians under hatches fast bound, and in their rooms put aboard in their ship the choicest soldiers he had of the Athenians, commanding them to set their course direct upon the city, and to keep themselves as close out of sight as could be. And he himself with all the rest of his soldiers landed presently, and marched to encounter with the Megarians, which were come out into the field. Now whilst they were fighting together, Solon’s men whom he had sent in the Megarians’ ship entered the haven and won the town. This is certainly true, and testified by that which is showed yet at this day. For to keep a memorial hereof, a ship of Athens arriveth quietly at the first, and by and by those that are in the ship make a great shout, and a man armed leaping out of the ship, runneth shouting towards the rock called Sciradion, which is as they come from the firm land: and hard by the same is the temple of Mars, which Solon built there after he had overcome the Megarians in battle, from whence he sent back again those prisoners that he had taken (which were saved from the slaughter of the battle) without any ransom paying. Nevertheless, the Megarians were sharply bent still, to recover Salamis again. Much hurt being done and suffered on both sides: both parties in the end made the Lacedæmonians judges of the quarrel.

Solon undoubtedly won great glory and honour by this exploit, yet was he much more honoured and esteemed, for the oration he made in defence of the temple of Apollo, in the city of Delphes: declaring that it was not meet to be suffered, that the Cyrrhæans should at their pleasure abuse the sanctuary of the oracle, and that they should aid the Delphians in honour and reverence of Apollo. Whereupon the counsel of the Amphictyons, being moved with his words and persuasions, proclaimed wars against the Cyrrhæans.

Now that this sedition was utterly appeased in Athens, for that the excommunicates were banished the country, the city fell again into their old troubles and dissensions about the government of the commonweal: and they were divided into so diverse parties and factions, as there were people of sundry places and territories within the country of Attica. For there were the people of the mountains, the people of the valleys, and the people of the seacoast. Those of the mountains, took the common people’s part for their lives. Those of the valley, would a few of the best citizens should carry the sway. The coastmen would that neither of them should prevail, because they would have had a mean government and mingled of them both. Furthermore, the faction between the poor and rich, proceeding of their unequality, was at that time very great. By reason whereof the city was in great danger, and it seemed there was no way to pacify or take up these controversies, unless some tyrant happened to rise, that would take upon him to rule the whole. For all the common people were so sore indebted to the rich, that either they ploughed their lands, and yielded them the sixth part of their crop (for which cause they were called hectemorii and servants), or else they borrowed money of them at usury, upon gauge of their bodies to serve it out. And if they were not able to pay them, then were they by the law delivered to their creditors, who kept them as bondsmen and slaves in their houses, or else they sent them into strange countries to be sold: and many even for very poverty were forced to sell their own children (for there was no law to forbid the contrary) or else to forsake their city and country, for the extreme cruelty and hard dealings of these abominable usurers, their creditors. Insomuch that many of the lustiest and stoutest of them, banded together in companies, and encouraged one another, not to suffer and bear any longer such extremity, but to choose them a stout and trusty captain, that might set them at liberty, and redeem those out of captivity, which were judged to be bondsmen and servants, for lack of paying of their debts at their days appointed: and so to make again a new division of all lands and tenements, and wholly to change and turn up the whole state and government.

Then the wisest men of the city, who saw Solon only neither partner with the rich in their oppression, neither partaker with the poor in their necessity: made suit to him, that it would please him to take the matter in hand, and to appease and pacify all these broils and sedition. Yet Phanias Lesbian writeth, that he used a subtilty, whereby he deceived both the one and the other side, concerning the commonweal. For he secretly promised the poor to divide the lands again: and the rich also, to confirm their covenants and bargains. Howsoever it fell out, it is very certain that Solon from the beginning made it a great matter, and was very scrupulous to deal between them, fearing the covetousness of the one, and arrogancy of the other. Howbeit in the end he was chosen governor after Philombrotus, and was made reformer of the rigour of the laws, and the temperer of the state and commonweal, by consent and agreement of both parties.

The rich accepted him, because he was no beggar: the poor did also like him, because he was an honest man. They say, moreover, that one word and sentence which he spake (which at that present was rife in every man’s mouth) that equality did breed no strife: did as well please the rich and wealthy, as the poor and needy. For the one sort conceived of this word equality, that he would measure all things according to the quality of the man: and the other took it for their purpose, that he would measure all things by the number, and by the poll only. Thus the captains of both sections persuaded and prayed him, boldly to take upon him that sovereign authority, since he had the whole city now at his commandment. The neuters also of every part, when they saw it very hard to pacify these things with law and reason, were well content that the wisest, and honestest man, should alone have the royal power in his hands. But his familiar friends above all rebuked him, saying he was to be accounted no better than a beast, if for fear of the name of tyrant, he would refuse to take upon him a kingdom: which is the most just and honourable state, if one take it upon him that is an honest man.

Now, notwithstanding he had refused the kingdom, yet he waxed nothing the more remiss or soft therefor in governing, neither would he bow for fear of the great, nor yet would frame his laws to their liking, that had chosen him their reformer. For where the mischief was tolerable, he did not straight pluck it up by the roots: neither did he so change the state, as he might have done, lest if he should have attempted to turn upside down the whole government, he might afterwards have been never able to settle and establish the same again. Therefore he only altered that which he thought by reason he could persuade his citizens unto, or else by force he ought to compel them to accept, mingling as he said, sour with sweet, and force with justice. And herewith agreeth his answer that he made afterwards unto one that asked him, if he had made the best laws he could for the Athenians? “Yea, sure,” saith he, “such as they were able to receive.” And this that followeth also, they have ever since observed in the Athenian tongue: to make certain things pleasant, that be hateful, finely conveying them under colour of pleasing names. As calling taxes, contributions: garrisons, guards: prisons, houses. And all this came up first by Solon’s invention, who called clearing of debts seisachtheia: in English, discharge.

The Law Concerning Debts

For the first change and reformation he made in government was this: he ordained that all manner of debts past should be clear, and nobody should ask his debtor anything for the time passed. That no man should thenceforth lend money out to usury upon covenants for the body to be bound, if it were not repaid. Howbeit some write (as Androtion among other) that the poor were contented that the interest only for usury should be moderated, without taking away the whole debt: and that Solon called this easy and gentle discharge, seisachtheia, with crying up the value of money. For he raised the pound of silver, being before but threescore and thirteen drachmas, full up to an hundred: so they which were to pay great sums of money, paid by tale as much as they ought, but with less number of pieces than the debt could have been paid when it was borrowed. And so the debtors gained much, and the creditors lost nothing. Nevertheless the greater part of them which have written the same, say, that this crying up of money, was a general discharge of all debts, conditions, and covenants upon the same: whereto the very poems themselves, which Solon wrote, do seem to agree. For he glorieth, and breaketh forth in his verses, that he had taken away all marks that separated men’s lands through the country of Attica, and that now he had set at liberty, that which before was in bondage. And that of the citizens of Athens, which for lack of payment of their debts had been condemned for slaves to their creditors, he had brought many home again out of strange countries, where they had been so long, that they had forgotten to speak their natural tongue, and others which remained at home in captivity, he had now set them all at good liberty.

But while he was in doing this, men say a thing thwarted him, that troubled him marvellously. For having framed an edict for clearing of all debts, and lacking only a little to grace it with words, and to give it some pretty preface, that otherwise was ready to be proclaimed: he opened himself somewhat to certain of his familiars whom he trusted (as Conon, Clinias, and Hipponicus) and told them how he would not meddle with lands and possessions, but would only clear and cut off all manner of debts. These men, before the proclamation came out, went presently to the money-men, and borrowed great sums of money of them, and laid it out straight upon land. So when the proclamation came out, they kept the lands they had purchased, but restored not the money they had borrowed. This foul part of theirs made Solon very ill spoken of, and wrongfully blamed: as if he had not only suffered it, but had been partaker of this wrong and injustice. Notwithstanding he cleared himself of this slanderous report, losing five talents by his own law. For it was well known that so much was due unto him, and he was the first that, following his own proclamation, did clearly release his debtors of the same. Notwithstanding, they ever after called Solon’s friends Chreocopides, cutters of debts. This law neither liked the one nor the other sort. For it greatly offended the rich, for cancelling their bonds: and it much more misliked the poor, because all lands and possessions they gaped for, were not made again common, and everybody alike rich and wealthy, as Lycurgus had made the Lacedæmonians.

But Lycurgus was the eleventh descended of the right line from Hercules, and had many years been king of Lacedæmon, where he had gotten great authority, and made himself many friends: all which things together, did greatly help him to execute that, which he wisely had imagined for the order of his commonweal. Yet also, he used more persuasion than force, a good witness thereof the loss of his eye: preferring a law before his private injury, which hath power to preserve a city long in union and concord, and to make citizens to be neither poor nor rich.

Solon could not attain to this. Howbeit he did what he could possible, with the power he had, as one seeking to win no credit with his citizens, but only by his counsel. To begin withal, he first took away all Draco’s bloody laws, saving for murder and manslaughter.

Class Legislation

Then Solon being desirous to have the chief offices of the city to remain in rich men’s hands, as already they did, and yet to mingle the authority of government in such sort, as the meaner people might bear a little sway, which they never could before: he made an estimate of the goods of every private citizen. And those which he found yearly worth five hundred bushels of corn, and other liquid fruits and upwards, he called pentacosiomedimni: as to say, five-hundred-bushel-men of revenue. And those that had three hundred bushels a year, and were able to keep a horse of service, he put in the second degree, and called them knights. They that might dispend but two hundred bushels a year, were put in the third place, and called zeugitæ. All other under those, were called thetes, as you would say, hirelings, or craftsmen living of their labour: whom he did not admit to bear any office in the city, neither were they taken as free citizens, saving they had voices in elections, and assemblies of the city, and in judgments, where the people wholly judged.

Furthermore because his laws were written somewhat obscurely, and might be diversely taken and interpreted, this did give a great deal more authority and power to the judges. For, considering all their controversies could not be ended, and judged by express law: they were driven of necessity always to run to the judges and debated their matters before them. Insomuch as the judges by this means came to be somewhat above the law: for they did even expound it as they would themselves.

Yet considering it was meet to provide for the poverty of the common sort of people: he suffered any man that would, to take upon him the defence of any poor man’s case that had the wrong. For if a man were hurt, beaten, forced, or otherwise wronged: any other man that would, might lawfully sue the offender, and prosecute law against him. And this was a wise law ordained of him, to accustom his citizens to be sorry for another’s hurt, and so to feel it, as if any part of his own body had been injured. And they say he made an answer on a time agreeable to this law. For, being asked what city he thought best governed, he answered: “That city where such as receive no wrong, do as earnestly defend wrong offered to others, as the very wrong and injury had been done unto themselves.” He erected also the council of the Areopagites, of those magistrates of the city, out of which they did yearly choose their governor: and he himself had been of that number, for that he had been governor for a year.

Wherefore perceiving now the people were grown to a stomach and haughtiness of mind because they were clear discharged of their debts: he set one up for matters of state, another council of an hundred chosen out of every tribe, whereof four hundred of them were to consult and debate of all matters, before they were propounded to the people: that when the great council of the people at large should be assembled, no matters should be put forth, unless it had been before well considered of, and digested, by the council of the four hundred. Moreover, he ordained the higher court should have the chief authority and power over all things, and chiefly to see the law executed and maintained: supposing that the commonweal being settled, and stayed with these two courts (as with two strong anchor-holds), it should be the less turmoiled and troubled, and the people also better pacified and quieted. The most part of writers hold this opinion, that it was Solon which erected the council of the Areopagites, as we have said, and it is very likely to be true, for that Draco in all his laws and ordinances made no manner of mention of the Areopagites, but always speaketh to the ephetes (which were judges of life and death) when he spake of murder, or of any man’s death.

Notwithstanding, the eighth law of the thirteenth table of Solon saith thus, in these very words: All such as have been banished or detected of naughty life, before Solon made his laws, shall be restored again to their goods and good name, except those which were condemned by order of the council of the Areopagites, or by the ephetes, or by the kings in open court, for murder, and death of any man, or for aspiring to usurp tyranny. These words to the contrary seem to prove and testify, that the council of the Areopagites was, before Solon was chosen reformer of the laws. For how could offenders and wicked men be condemned by order of the council of the Areopagites before Solon, if Solon was the first that gave it authority to judge?

Miscellaneous Laws; the Rights of Women

Furthermore amongst the rest of his laws, one of them indeed was of his own device: for the like was never stablished elsewhere. And it is that law, that pronounceth him defamed, and dishonest, who in a civil uproar among the citizens, sitteth still a looker-on, and a neuter, and taketh part with neither side. Whereby his mind was as it should appear, that private men should not be only careful to put themselves and their causes in safety, nor yet should be careless for other men’s matters, or think it a virtue not to meddle with the miseries and misfortunes of their country, but from the beginning of every sedition that they should join with those that take the justest cause in hand, and rather to hazard themselves with such, than to tarry looking (without putting themselves in danger) which of the two should have the victory.

There is another law also, which at the first sight methinketh is very unhonest and fond. That if any man according to the law hath matched with a rich heir and inheritor, and of himself is impotent, and unable to do the office of a husband, she may lawfully lie with any whom she liketh, of her husband’s nearest kinsmen. Howbeit some affirm, that it is a wise made law for those, which knowing themselves unmeet to entertain wedlock, will for covetousness of lands, marry with rich heirs and possessioners, and mind to abuse poor gentlewomen under the colour of law: and will think to force and restrain nature. This also confirmeth the same, that such a new-married wife should be shut up with her husband, and eat a quince with him: and that he also which marrieth such an inheritor, should of duty see her thrice a month at the least. For although he get no children of her, yet it is an honour the husband doth to his wife, arguing that he taketh her for an honest woman, that he loveth her, and that he esteemeth of her. Besides, it taketh away many mislikings and displeasures which oftentimes happen in such cases, and keepeth love and good will waking, that it die not utterly between them.

Furthermore, he took away all jointures and dowries in other marriages, and willed that the wives should bring their husbands but three gowns only, with some other little movables of small value, and without any other thing as it were: utterly forbidding that they should buy their husbands, or that they should make merchandise of marriages, as of other trades to gain, but would that man and woman should marry together for issue, for pleasure, and for love, but in no case for money.

They greatly commend another law of Solon’s, which forbiddeth to speak ill of the dead. For it is a good and godly thing to think, that they ought not to touch the dead, no more than to touch holy things; and men should take great heed to offend those that are departed out of this world; besides it is a token of wisdom and civility, to beware of immortal enemies. He commanded also in the self-same law, that no man should speak ill of the living, specially in churches, during divine service, or in council chamber of the city, nor in the theatres whilst games were a-playing: upon pain of three silver drachmæ to be paid to him that was injured, and two to the common treasury.

So he was marvellously well thought of, for the law that he made touching wills and testaments. For before, men might not lawfully make their heirs whom they would, but the goods came to the children or kindred of the testator. But he leaving it at liberty, to dispose their goods where they thought good, so they had no children of their own: did therein prefer friendship before kindred, and good will and favour before necessity and constraint, and so made every one lord and master of his own goods. Yet he did not simply and alike allow all sorts of gifts howsoever they were made: but those only which were made by men of sound memory, or by those whose wits failed them not by extreme sickness, or through drinks, medicines, poisonings, charms, or other such violence and extraordinary means, neither yet through the enticements and persuasions of women. As thinking very wisely, there was no difference at all between those that were evidently forced by constraint, and those that were compassed and wrought by subornation at length to do a thing against their will, taking fraud in this case equal with violence, and pleasure with sorrow, as passions with madness, which commonly have as much force the one as the other, to draw and drive men from reason.

He made another law also, in which he appointed women their times to go abroad into the fields, their mourning, their feasts and sacrifices, plucking from them all disorder and wilful liberty, which they used before. For he did forbid that they should carry out of the city with them above three gowns, and to take victuals with them above the value of a half-penny, neither basket nor pannier above a cubit high: and especially he did forbid them to go in the night other than in their coach, and that a torch should be carried before them. He did forbid them also at the burial of the dead, to tear and spoil themselves with blows, to make lamentations in verses, to weep at the funeral of a stranger not being their kinsman, to sacrifice an ox on the grave of the dead, to bury above three gowns with the corpse, to go to other men’s graves, but at the very time of burying the corpse.

Results of Solon’s Legislation

And perceiving that the city of Athens began to replenish daily more and more, by men’s repairing thither from all parts, and by reason of the great assured safety and liberty that they found there: and also considering how the greatest part of the realm became in manner heathy, and was very barren, and that men trafficking the seas, are not wont to bring any merchandise to those, which can give them nothing again in exchange: he began to practise that his citizens should give themselves unto crafts and occupations, and made a law, that the son should not be bound to relieve his father being old, unless he had set him in his youth to some occupation.

It was a wise part of Lycurgus (who dwelt in a city where was no resort for strangers, and had so great a territory, as could have furnished twice as many people, as Euripides saith, and moreover on all sides was environed with a great number of slaves of the helots, whom it was needful to keep still in labour and work continually) to have his citizens always occupied in exercises of feats of arms, without making them to learn any other science, but discharge them of all other miserable occupations and handicrafts.

But Solon framing his laws unto things, and not things unto laws, when he saw the country of Attica so lean and barren, that it could hardly bring forth to sustain those that tilled the ground only, and therefore much more impossible to keep so great a multitude of idle people as were in Athens: thought it very requisite to set up occupations, and to give them countenance and estimation. Therefore he ordered, that the council of the Areopagites, should have full power and authority to inquire how every man lived in the city, and also to punish such as they found idle people, and did not labour. Yet to say truly, in Solon’s laws touching women, there are many absurdities, as they fall out ill-favouredly. For he maketh it lawful for any man to kill an adulterer taking him with the fact. But he that ravisheth or forcibly taketh away a free woman, is only condemned to pay a hundred silver drachmæ.

Of the fruits of the earth, he was contented they should transport and sell only oil out of the realm to strangers, but no other fruit or grain. He ordained that the governor of the city should yearly proclaim open curses against those that should do to the contrary, or else he himself making default therein, should be fined at a hundred drachmæ. This ordinance is in the first table of Solon’s laws, and therefore we may not altogether discredit those which say, they did forbid in the old time that men should carry figs out of the country of Attica, and that from hence it came that these pick-thanks, which bewray and accuse them that transported figs, were called sycophants. He made another law also against the hurt that beasts might do unto men. Wherein he ordained, that if a dog did bite any man, he that owned him should deliver to him that was bitten, his dog tied to a log of timber of four cubits long: and this was a very good device, to make men safe from dogs. But he was very straight in one law he made, that no stranger might be made denizen and free man of the city of Athens, unless he were a banished man forever out of his country, or else that he should come and dwell there with all his family, to exercise some craft or science. Notwithstanding, they say he made not this law so much to put strangers from their freedom there, as to draw them thither, assuring them by this ordinance, they might come and be free of the city: and he thought moreover, that both the one and the other would be more faithful to the commonweal of Athens.

This also was another of Solon’s laws, which he ordained for those that should feast certain days at the townhouse of the city, at other men’s cost. For he would not allow, that one man should come often to feasts there. And if any man were invited thither to the feast, and did refuse to come: he did set a fine on his head, as reproving the miserable niggardliness of the one and the presumptuous arrogancy of the other, to contemn and despise common order.

After he had made his laws, he did stablish them to continue for the space of one hundred years, and they were written in tables of wood called axones. So all the councils and magistrates together did swear, that they would keep Solon’s laws themselves, and also cause them to be observed of others thoroughly and particularly. Then every one of the thesmothetes (which were certain officers attendant on the council, and had special charge to see the laws observed) did solemnly swear in the open market-place, near the stone where the proclamations are proclaimed: and every one of them both promised, and vowed openly to keep the same laws, and that if any of them did in any one point break the said ordinances, then they were content that such offender should pay to the temple of Apollo, at the city of Delphi, an image of fine gold, that should weigh as much as himself.

Now after his laws were proclaimed, there came some daily unto him, which either praised them, or misliked them: and prayed him either to take away, or to add something unto them. Many again came and asked him how he understood some sentence of his laws: and requested him to declare his meaning, and how it should be taken. Wherefore considering how it were to no purpose to refuse to do it, and again how it would get him much envy and ill will to yield thereunto: he determined (happen what would) to wind himself out of these briers, and to fly the groanings, complaints, and quarrels of his citizens. So, to convey himself awhile out of the way, he took upon him to be master of a ship in a certain voyage, and asked license for ten years of the Athenians to go beyond sea, hoping by that time the Athenians would be very well acquainted with his laws.

SOLON’S JOURNEY AND RETURN; PISISTRATUS

[Sidenote: [590-580 B.C.]]

So went he to the seas, and the first place of his arrival was in Egypt, where he remained awhile. And as for the meeting and talk betwixt him and King Crœsus, I know there are that by distance of time will prove it but a fable, and devised of pleasure: but for my part I will not reject, nor condemn so famous a history, received and approved by so many grave testimonies. Moreover it is very agreeable to Solon’s manners and nature, and also not unlike to his wisdom and magnanimity: although in all points it agreeth not with certain tables (which they call Chronicles) where they have busily noted the order and course of times which even to this day, many have curiously sought to correct.[15]

But during the time of his absence, great seditions rose at Athens amongst the inhabitants, who had gotten them several heads amongst them: as those of the valley had made Lycurgus their head. The coast-men Megacles, the son of Alcmæon. And those of the mountains, Pisistratus; with whom all artificers and craftsmen living of their handy labour were joined, which were the stoutest against the rich. So that notwithstanding the city kept Solon’s laws and ordinances, yet was there not a man but gaped for a change, and desired to see things in another state.

[Sidenote: [580-558 B.C.]]

The whole commonweal broiling thus with troubles, Solon arrived at Athens, where every man did honour and reverence him: howbeit he was no more able to speak aloud in open assembly to the people, nor to deal in matters as he had done before, because his age would not suffer him: and therefore he spake with every one of the heads of the several factions apart, trying if he could agree and reconcile them together again.

Whereupon Pisistratus seemed to be more willing than any of the rest, for he was courteous, and marvellous fair spoken, and showed himself besides very good and pitiful to the poor, and temperate also to his enemies: further, if any good quality were lacking in him, he did so finely counterfeit it, that men imagined it was more in him, than in those that naturally had it in them indeed. By this art and fine manner of his, he deceived the poor common people. Howbeit Solon found him straight, and saw the mark he shot at: but yet hated him not at that time, and sought still to win him, and bring him to reason.

Shortly after Pisistratus having wounded himself, and bloodied all his body over, caused his men to carry him in his couch into the market-place, where he put the people in an uproar, and told them that they were his enemies that thus traitorously had handled and arrayed him, for that he stood with them about the governing of the commonweal: insomuch as many of them were marvellously offended, and mutinied by and by, crying out it was shamefully done. Then Solon drawing near said unto him: “O thou son of Hippocrates, thou dost ill-favouredly counterfeit the person of Homer’s Ulysses: for thou hast whipped thyself to deceive thy citizens, as he did tear and scratch himself, to deceive his enemies.” Notwithstanding this, the common people were still in uproar, being ready to take arms for Pisistratus: and there was a general council assembled, in the which one Ariston spake, that they should grant fifty men, to carry halberds and maces before Pisistratus for guard of his person.

But Solon going up into the pulpit for orations, stoutly inveighed against it. But in the end, seeing the poor people did tumult still, taking Pisistratus’ part, and that the rich fled here and there, he went his way also.

Wherefore he hied him home again, and took his weapons out of his house, and laid them before his gate in the midst of the street, saying: “For my part, I have done what I can possible, to help and defend the laws and liberties of my country.”

So from that time he betook himself unto his ease, and never after dealt any more in matters of state, or commonweal. His friends did counsel him to fly: but all they could not persuade him to it. For he kept his house, and gave himself to make verses, in which he sore reproved the Athenians’ faults. His friends hereupon did warn him to beware of such speeches, and to take heed what he said, lest if it came unto the tyrant’s ears, he might put him to death for it. And further, they asked him wherein he trusted, that he spake so boldly. He answered them, “In my age.”

Howbeit Pisistratus, after he had obtained his purpose, sending for him upon his word and faith, did honour and entertain him so well, that Solon in the end became one of his council, and approved many things which he did.

Solon lived a long time after Pisistratus had usurped the tyranny, as Heraclides Ponticus writeth. Howbeit Phanias Ephesian writeth, that he lived not above two years after.[d]

A MODERN VIEW OF SOLONIAN LAWS AND CONSTITUTION

As a recent summing up of Solon, we may quote Professor Bury:

“He was a poet, not because he was poetically inspired, like the Parian Archilochus of an earlier, or the Lesbian Sappho of his own, generation; but because at that time every man of letters was a poet; there was no prose literature. A hundred years later Solon would have used prose as the vehicle of his thought. We are fortunate enough to possess portions of poems--political pamphlets--which he published for the purpose of guiding public opinion; and thus we have his view of the situation in his own words.

“The character of the remedial measures of Solon is imperfectly known. His title to fame as one of the great statesmen of Europe rests upon his reform of the constitution. He discovered a secret of democracy, and he used his discovery to build up the constitution on democratic foundations. The Athenian commonwealth did not actually become a democracy till many years later. The radical measure of Solon, which was the very corner-stone of the Athenian democracy, was his constitution of the courts of justice. He composed the law courts out of all the citizens, including the Thetes; and as the panels of judges were enrolled by lot, the poorest burgher might have his turn. The constitution of the judicial courts out of the whole people was the secret of democracy which Solon discovered.

“It was the fate of Solon to live long enough to see the establishment of the tyranny which he dreaded. We know not what part he had taken in the troubled world of politics since his return to Athens. The story was invented that he called upon the citizens to arm themselves against the tyrant, but called in vain; and that then, laying his arms outside the threshold of his house, he cried, ‘I have aided, so far as I could, my country and the constitution, and I appeal to others to do likewise.’ Nor has the story that he refused to live under a tyranny and sought refuge with his Cyprian friend the king of Soli, any good foundation. We know only that in his later years he enjoyed the pleasures of wine and love, and that he survived but a short time the seizure of the tyranny by Pisistratus, who at least treated the old man with respect.”[e]

FOOTNOTES

[15] [This famous story has already been given in the Appendix to the history of Western Asia, Vol. II.]

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XIII. PISISTRATUS THE TYRANT

Pisistratus directed with admirable moderation the courses of the revolution he had produced. Many causes of success were combined in his favour. His enemies had been the supposed enemies of the people, and the multitude doubtless beheld the flight of the Alcmæonidæ (still odious in their eyes by the massacre of Cylon) as the defeat of a foe, while the triumph of the popular chief was recognised as the victory of the people. In all revolutions the man who has sided with the people is permitted by the people the greatest extent of license. It is easy to perceive, by the general desire which the Athenians had expressed for the elevation of Solon to the supreme authority, that the notion of regal authority was not yet hateful to them, and that they were scarcely prepared for the liberties with which they were entrusted. But although they submitted thus patiently to the ascendency of Pisistratus, it is evident that a less benevolent, or less artful tyrant would not have been equally successful. Raised above the law, that subtle genius governed only by the law; nay, he affected to consider its authority greater than his own. He assumed no title--no attribute of sovereignty. He was accused of murder, and he humbly appeared before the tribunal of the Areopagus--a proof not more of the moderation of the usurper than of the influence of public opinion. He enforced the laws of Solon, and compelled the unruly tempers of his faction to subscribe to their wholesome rigour. The one revolution did not, therefore, supplant, it confirmed, the other. “By these means,” says Herodotus, “Pisistratus mastered Athens, and yet his situation was far from secure.”

Although the heads of the more moderate party, under Megacles, had been expelled from Athens, yet the faction, equally powerful, and equally hostile, headed by Lycurgus, and embraced by the bulk of the nobles, still remained. For a time, extending perhaps to five or six years, Pisistratus retained his power; but at length, Lycurgus, uniting with the exiled Alcmæonidæ, succeeded in expelling him from the city. But the union that had led to his expulsion, ceased with that event. The contests between the lowlanders and the coastmen were only more inflamed by the defeat of the third party which had operated as a balance of power, and the broils of their several leaders were fed by personal ambition as by hereditary animosities. Megacles, therefore, unable to maintain equal ground with Lycurgus, turned his thoughts towards the enemy he had subdued, and sent proposals to Pisistratus, offering to unite their forces, and to support him in his pretensions to the tyranny, upon condition that the exiled chief should marry his daughter Cœsyra. Pisistratus readily acceded to the terms, and it was resolved by a theatrical pageant to reconcile his return to the people.[b]

[Sidenote: [550-540 B.C.]]

This was, according to Herodotus, “the most ridiculous project that was ever imagined.” “In the Pæanean tribe was a woman named Phya,” he says, “four cubits high, wanting three fingers, and in other respects handsome; having dressed this woman in a complete suit of armour, and placed her on a chariot, and having shown her beforehand how to assume the most becoming demeanour, they drove her to the city, having sent heralds before, who, on their arrival in the city, proclaimed what was ordered in these terms: ‘O Athenians, receive with kind wishes Pisistratus, whom Minerva herself, honouring above all men, now conducts back to her own citadel.’ They then went about proclaiming this; and a report was presently spread among the people that Minerva was bringing back Pisistratus; and the people in the city, believing this woman to be the goddess, both adored a human being, and received Pisistratus.”[c]

The sagacity of the Athenians was already so acute, and the artifice appeared to Herodotus so gross, that the simple Halicarnassian could scarcely credit the authenticity of this tale. But it is possible that the people viewed the procession as an ingenious allegory, to the adaptation of which they were already disposed; and that like the populace of a later and yet more civilised people, they hailed the goddess while they recognised the prostitute.[16] Be that as it may, the son of Hippocrates recovered his authority and fulfilled his treaty with Megacles by a marriage with his daughter. Between the commencement of his first tyranny and the date of his second return, there was probably an interval of twelve years. His sons were already adults. Partly from a desire not to increase his family, partly from some superstitious disinclination to the blood of the Alcmæonidæ, which the massacre of Cylon still stigmatised with contamination, Pisistratus conducted himself towards the fair Cœsyra with a chastity either unwelcome to her affection, or afflicting to her pride. The unwedded wife communicated the mortifying secret to her mother, from whose lips it soon travelled to the father. He did not view the purity of Pisistratus with charitable eyes. He thought it an affront to his own person that that of his daughter should be so tranquilly regarded. He entered into a league with his former opponents against the usurper, and so great was the danger, that Pisistratus (despite his habitual courage) betook himself hastily to flight--a strange instance of the caprice of human events, that a man could with a greater impunity subdue the freedom of his country, than affront the vanity of his wife!

Pisistratus, his sons and partisans, retired to Eretria in Eubœa: there they deliberated as to their future proceedings--should they submit to their exile, or attempt to retrieve their power? The counsels of his son Hippias, prevailed with Pisistratus; it was resolved once more to attempt the sovereignty of Athens. The neighbouring tribes assisted the exiles with forage and shelter. Many cities accorded the celebrated noble large sums of money, and the Thebans outdid the rest in pernicious liberality. A troop of Argive adventurers came from the Peloponnesus to tender to the baffled usurper the assistance of their swords, and Lygdamis, an individual of Naxos, himself ambitious of the government of his native state, increased his resources both by money and military force. At length, though after a long and tedious period of no less than eleven years, Pisistratus resolved to hazard the issue of open war. At the head of a foreign force he advanced to Marathon, and pitched his tents upon its immortal plain. Troops of the factious, or discontented, thronged from Athens to his camp, while the bulk of the citizens, unaffected by such desertions, viewed his preparations with indifference. At length, when they heard that Pisistratus had broken up his encampment, and was on his march to the city, the Athenians awoke from their apathy, and collected their forces to oppose him. He continued to advance his troops, halted at the temple of Minerva, whose earthly representative had once so benignly assisted him, and pitched his tents opposite the fane. He took advantage of that time in which the Athenians, during the heat of the day, were at their entertainments, or indulging the noontide repose, still so grateful to the inhabitants of a warmer climate, to commence his attack. He soon scattered the foe, and ordered his sons to overtake them in their flight, to bid them return peaceably to their employments, and fear nothing from his vengeance. His clemency assisted the effect of his valour, and once more the son of Hippocrates became the master of the Athenian commonwealth.

[Sidenote: [540 B.C.]]

Pisistratus lost no time in strengthening himself by formidable alliances. He retained many auxiliary troops, and provided large pecuniary resources. He spared the persons of his opponents, but sent their children as hostages to Naxos, which he first reduced and consigned to the tyranny of his auxiliary, Lygdamis. Many of his inveterate enemies had perished on the field--many fled from the fear of his revenge. He was undisturbed in the renewal of his sway, and having no motive for violence, pursued the natural bent of a mild and generous disposition, ruling as one who wishes men to forget the means by which his power has been attained.

It was in harmony with this part of his character that Pisistratus refined the taste and socialised the habits of the citizens, by the erection of buildings dedicated to the public worship, or the public uses, and laid out the stately gardens of the Lyceum--(in after-times the favourite haunt of Philosophy)--by the banks of the river dedicated to Song. Pisistratus thus did more than continue the laws of Solon--he inculcated the intellectual habits which the laws were designed to create. And as in the circle of human events the faults of one man often confirm what was begun by the virtues of another, so perhaps the usurpation of Pisistratus was necessary to establish the institutions of Solon. It is clear that the great lawgiver was not appreciated at the close of his life as his personal authority had ceased to have influence, so possibly might have soon ceased the authority of his code. The citizens required repose, to examine, to feel, to estimate the blessings of his laws--that repose they possessed under Pisistratus. Amidst the tumult of fierce and equipoised factions it might be fortunate that a single individual was raised above the rest, who, having the wisdom to appreciate the institutions of Solon, had the authority to enforce them. Silently they grew up under his usurped but benignant sway, pervading, penetrating, exalting the people, and fitting them by degrees to the liberty those institutions were intended to confer. If the disorders of the republic led to the ascendency of Pisistratus so the ascendency of Pisistratus paved the way for the renewal of the republic. As Cromwell was the representative of the very sentiments he appeared to subvert--as Napoleon in his own person incorporated the principles of the revolution of France, so the tyranny of Pisistratus concentrated and embodied the elements of that democracy he rather wielded than overthrew.

At home, time and tranquillity cemented the new laws; poetry set before the emulation of the Athenians its noblest monument in the epics of Homer; and tragedy put forth its first unmellowed fruits in the rude recitations of Thespis. Pisistratus sought also to counterbalance the growing passion for commerce by peculiar attention to agriculture, in which it is not unlikely that he was considerably influenced by early prepossessions, for his party had been the mountaineers attached to rural pursuits, and his adversaries the coastmen engaged in traffic. We learn from Aristotle that his policy consisted much in subjecting and humbling the Pedieis, or wealthy nobles of the lowlands. But his very affection to agriculture must have tended to strengthen an aristocracy, and his humility to the Areopagus was a proof of his desire to conciliate the least democratic of the Athenian courts. He probably, therefore, acted only against such individual chiefs as had incurred his resentment, or as menaced his power; nor can we perceive in his measures the systematic and deliberate policy, common with other Greek tyrants, to break up an aristocracy and create a middle class.

[Sidenote: [540-527 B.C.]]

Abroad, the ambition of Pisistratus, though not extensive, was successful. There was a town on the Hellespont, called Sigeum, which had long been a subject of contest between the Athenians and the Mytileneans. Some years before the legislation of Solon, the Athenian general, Phrynon, had been slain in single combat by Pittacus, one of the Seven Wise Men, who had come into the field armed like the Roman retiarius, with a net, a trident, and a dagger. This feud was terminated by the arbitration of Periander, tyrant of Corinth, who awarded Sigeum to the Athenians, which was then in their possession, by a wise and plausible decree, that each party should keep what it had got. This war was chiefly remarkable for an incident that introduces us somewhat unfavourably to the most animated of the lyric poets. Alcæus, an eminent citizen of Mytilene, and, according to ancient scandal, the unsuccessful lover of Sappho, conceived a passion for military fame: in his first engagement he seems to have discovered that his proper vocation was rather to sing of battles than to share them. He fled from the field, leaving his arms behind him, which the Athenians obtained, and suspended at Sigeum in the temple of Minerva. Although this single action, which Alcæus himself recorded, cannot be fairly held a sufficient proof of the poet’s cowardice, yet his character and patriotism are more equivocal than his genius. Of the last we have ample testimony,--though few remains save in the frigid grace of the imitations of Horace. The subsequent weakness and civil dissensions of Athens, were not favourable to the maintenance of this distant conquest--the Mytileneans regained Sigeum. Against this town Pisistratus now directed his arms--wrested it from the Mytileneans--and instead of annexing it to the republic of Athens, assigned its government to the tyranny of his natural son, Hegesistratus--a stormy dominion, which the valour of the bastard defended against repeated assaults.

But one incident, the full importance of which the reader must wait awhile to perceive, we shall in this place relate. Among the most powerful of the Athenians was a noble named Miltiades, son of Cypselus. By original descent, he was from the neighbouring island of Ægina, and of the heroic race of Æacus; but he dated the establishment of his house in Athens from no less distant a founder than the son of Ajax. Miltiades had added new lustre to his name by a victory at the Olympic Games. It was probably during the first tyranny of Pisistratus that an adventure, attended with vast results to Greece, befell this noble. His family were among the enemies of Pisistratus, and were regarded by that sagacious usurper with a jealous apprehension, which almost appears prophetic. Miltiades was, therefore, uneasy under the government of Pisistratus, and discontented with his position in Athens.

In that narrow territory which, skirting the Hellespont, was called the Chersonesus, or Peninsula, dwelt the Doloncians, a Thracian tribe. Engaged in an obstinate war with the neighbouring Absinthians, the Doloncians had sent to the oracle of Delphi to learn the result of the contest.[b]

The Pythian answered them, “that they should take that man with them to their country to found a colony, who after their departure from the temple should first offer them hospitality.” Accordingly the Doloncians, going by the sacred way, went through the territories of the Phocians and Bœotians, and when no one invited them, turned out of the road towards Athens. Miltiades, being seated in his own portico, and seeing the Doloncians passing by, wearing a dress not belonging to the country, and carrying javelins, called out to them; and upon their coming to him, he offered them shelter and hospitality. They having accepted his invitation, and having been entertained by him, made known to him the whole oracle, and entreated him to obey his duty. Their words persuaded Miltiades as soon as he heard them, for he was troubled with the government of Pisistratus, and desired to get out of his way. He therefore immediately set out to Delphi to consult the oracle, whether he should do that which the Doloncians requested of him. The Pythian having bid him do so, thereupon Miltiades, taking with him all such Athenians as were willing to join in the expedition, set sail with the Doloncians, and took possession of the country; and they who introduced him appointed him tyrant.[c]

Miltiades (probably B.C. 559) first of all fortified a great part of the isthmus, as a barrier to the attacks of the Absinthians; but shortly afterwards, in a feud with the people of Lampsacus, he was taken prisoner by the enemy. Miltiades, however, had already secured the esteem and protection of Crœsus; and the Lydian monarch remonstrated with the Lampsacenes in so formidable a tone of menace, that the Athenian obtained his release, and regained his new principality. In the meanwhile, his brother Cimon, (who was chiefly remarkable for his success at the Olympic Games,) sharing the political sentiments of his house, had been driven into exile by Pisistratus. By a transfer to the brilliant tyrant of a victory in the Olympic chariot-race, he, however, propitiated Pisistratus, and returned to Athens.

Full of years, and in the serene enjoyment of power, Pisistratus died (B.C. 527). His character may already be gathered from his actions: crafty in the pursuit of power, but magnanimous in its possession, we have only, with some qualification, to repeat the eulogium on him ascribed to his greater kinsman Solon--“That he was the best of tyrants, and without a vice save that of ambition.”[b]

THE VIRTUES OF PISISTRATUS’ RULE

Pisistratus was far from overturning the constitution of Athens; rather did Solon’s ordinances remain in full force under him. The reasonable and necessary progress of development in the state which lay at the root of the movement which produced Greek tyrannies, had been in every way provided for by Solon, and consequently wise and temperate tyrants might govern in accordance with the Solonian laws. Pisistratus honoured the memory of his relative, with whose ideas their former intercourse had made him familiar, and he therefore fostered and forwarded his instructions, so far as they were consistent with his own supremacy. He himself submitted to the laws, and is said to have appeared in person before the Areopagus, to justify himself against a complaint, so that on the whole his government greatly contributed to accustom the Athenians to the laws. It must be confessed, however, that he raised the money which he required for the maintenance of his troops, as well as for the buildings and public festivals, by the mere right of tyranny, and by levying a tenth on the real estate of the citizens.

His new measures and dispositions also exhibited the character of a wise moderation, and were in harmony with Solon. Thus he insisted on the obligation of the commonwealth to care for those who were wounded in the wars, as well as for the families of such as had fallen in battle. He especially took upon himself the charge of public morality, the fostering of those good manners which consist in the respect of youth for age and in reverence towards sacred things. He promulgated a law against idle loitering about the streets, and, although he had himself risen to greatness in the market through the agency of the people who had come in from the country, still he regarded the increasing mass of the townsfolk with anxiety. For this reason he sought to oppose a barrier to the tendency to constitute the life of a great city, which prevailed amongst the Ionic races, and following the precedent of Periander and the Orthagoridæ, he made entry into the capital more difficult. He endeavoured to raise the peasant class, which Solon had rescued, and to encourage the taste for agriculture.

With these important dispositions, whose spirit was pre-eminently that of Hipparchus to whom the whole civilisation of the country was so much indebted, were also connected the great aqueducts which brought the drinking-water from the mountains to the capital through rocky underground conduits. That these canals might be inspected and cleaned in every part, shafts were cut through the rock at stated intervals, and thus light and air were introduced into the dark channels. On the outskirts of the town the inflowing water was collected in great rock basins, where it clarified before disseminating itself into the town and feeding the public fountains. These wonderful works have continued in a state of efficiency down to our own day.

Pisistratus governed Athens, but he bore no sovereign title, on the strength of which to lay claim to unlimited supremacy. He had, in truth, grounded his rule on force; he retained in his service a standing army, which, dependent on him alone and uncontrolled by the vote of the citizens, could be all the more crushingly opposed to any attempt at a rising, since the greater part of the citizens were unarmed, the townsfolk diminished in number, and the public interest, from political circumstances, directed partly to rural economy, partly to the new town institutions. The order of the officers of state remained unaltered, only that one of them was always in the hands of a member of Pisistratus’ family, in which he managed to suppress every sign of disunion with great skill, so that to the people the ruling house appeared united in itself and animated by but one spirit. In this sense men spoke of the government of the Pisistratidæ, and could not refuse recognition to the manifold gifts which distinguished the house.

It was a wise counsel which the old state organisers gave the tyrants, that they should bestow on their rule as much as possible the character of ancient royalty, so that the usurping origin of their power might be forgotten. Thus Pisistratus did not, like the Cypselidæ and Orthagoridæ, desire to break with the past of the state, but rather to connect himself closely with the ancient and glorious history of the country, so that after all the evil which the party government of the nobility had brought on Attica, she might be restored the blessing of a united rule. Standing superior to the parties, as a relative to the ancient royal house, he believed himself especially chosen to accomplish this end. With this view, he lived on the citadel, near the altar of Zeus Herceios, the family hearth of the ancient princes of the country, watching over the turbulent citizens from the summit of the rock, which, before the building of the Propylæa, was still more inaccessible than afterwards. The very position of his dwelling must have drawn him into a close relation with the goddess of the citadel and her priesthood.

The public life of the Athenians was awakened and transformed in every direction. Athens became a new town within and without. With her new highways and military roads, her town squares, gymnasia, fountains and aqueducts, her new altars, temples and temple festivals, she stood out prominently from the crowd of Greek towns, and the Pisistratidæ neglected nothing which might contribute to lend her new importance by means of numerous alliances with the islands and shores of the Ægean Sea.

To this end, it was not enough that the Athenians ruled in Delos, Naxos, and at the Hellespont, but they must also appropriate to themselves the intellectual treasures of the further coasts where the Hellenic spirit showed itself at its best, and thus enrich their own life. For this purpose Solon had already introduced the Homeric rhapsodies into Athens, and ordained their public recitation at the festivals. Pisistratus joined in these efforts, with a full appreciation of the importance of the matter, though not with the disinterestedness of the Solonian love for art, but designedly, and for his own advantage. For he ministered at once to the fame of his ancestors and the splendour of his house.

These songs had hitherto been passed down by word of mouth, and the noblest abilities of the nation had been dedicated to the preservation of this national treasure in widely disseminated schools of bards. Nevertheless, even with the utmost power of memory, it was unavoidable that all kinds of confusion should be introduced into the tradition, that the original should be disfigured, what was authentic be lost, spurious matter creep in, and the whole, the most important collection possessed by the Hellenic people, fall to pieces. The danger became the more threatening, the higher rose the turbulence of the times, and the more the individual states deviated in special directions and the interests of modern times gained primary importance. It became, therefore, a state obligation to meet this danger, and to take in hand the task which individual ability had not succeeded in accomplishing; and the state was all the more concerned in the matter since the recital of the Homeric poems had been prescribed in the ordinances for the public festivals.

It is to the great merit of Pisistratus to have clearly recognised that nothing could create for the Athenians a greater and more lasting renown than could be achieved by assuming this task. He therefore summoned a number of learned men, and commissioned them to collect and compare the texts of the rhapsodies, to cut out what did not belong, to unite what was scattered, and fix the Homeric epos as a whole, a great record of national life, in a standard form. Thus Onomacritus the Athenian, Zopyras of Heraclea, and Orpheus of Croton worked under the superintendence of the regent; they formed a scientific commission, which had an extensive sphere of labour; for not only were the Odyssey and Iliad revised, but also that later epos, that is to say the poetic writings of the so-called “cyclic poets,” which had come into existence as a sequel supplementary to the Iliad and Odyssey, together with the whole treasure of the Ionic epos, which was united under the name of Homer, besides Hesiod and the religious poems. Pisistratus took a personal interest in the work, and even here we can trace the character of a tyranny in that alterations, omissions, and interpolations were made according to his taste or policy. Thus, for example, in the catalogue of ships the Salaminians were ranged among the Athenian levies, in order to supply a traditional authority for an ancient claim of Athens.

The end and aim of the proceeding was completely attained. The most important branch of the poetic art, which had developed amongst the Hellenes, namely, the epic of the Ionic and Bœotian schools, was transplanted to Athens. Here for the first time a Hellenic philology was founded: for, in the work of collecting, the critical faculty was first awakened, since the collecting involved the distinction of genuine from spurious, ancient from modern, and, though the scientific performance as such could not bear a very close scrutiny, yet still the treasure of the Homeric poems received from the Athenians the first appreciation of its national significance, and it was now that writing was for the first time employed to secure an irreplaceable national possession against the dangers of a merely verbal tradition. The poems were not, however, by any means alienated from ordinary life, but were raised to a higher position in the festivals of the town and the education of the young. The city of Pisistratus acquired an authoritative reputation in the domain of national poetry; through him a Homer and Hesiod came into existence which could be read in the same form to the ends of the Greek world.

The collection and investigation went back beyond Homer to the most ancient sources of Hellenic theology, of which the Thracian Orpheus was regarded as the founder, and which Onomacritus now worked up into a new system of mystic wisdom, while at the same time it was utilised to give enhanced importance to the favourite cult of the dynasty, the worship of Dionysus. With it was joined the collection of oracular sayings, upon which the Pisistratidæ placed a special value, as well as the arrangement of the historical records, especially the genealogies.

Thus Athens became a centre of scientific learning and labour. If any one wished to gain a sight of any poem worthy of remembrance which had been written in the Hellenic tongue, or of anything concerning the knowledge of the gods and of ethics which had been thought out by the ancients and handed down by tradition from former times, he must journey to Athens. Here, on the citadel of Pisistratus, the whole treasure was united; here the works of the nation’s poets and wise men were collected together, carefully inscribed in rolls, well arranged, and suitably disposed.

Yet it was not enough to garner what remained from ancient times; there was also a desire to encourage living art and to have its masters in Athens, and specially those in the lyric art, which had succeeded the epic, and during the age of the tyrants was in full vigour. The lyric poets were especially qualified to enhance the brilliance of courts, and to ennoble their feasts, and were consequently summoned from one place to another. Thus the Pisistratidæ sent out their state ships to fetch Anacreon of Teos, the joyous poet and comrade of Polycrates, to Athens, and thus Simonides of Ceos and Lasus of Hermione dwelt at the tyrant’s Court of the Muses.

But quite new germs of national poetry were also unfolded under them and by their means. For they were already the fosterers of the worship of Dionysus [or Bacchus], and at the latter’s festivals were developed not only the choral dance and choral song of the Dithyrambus, which Arion had invented and Lasus further improved, but mimic representations were added to them, in which masked choruses appeared, and singers who assumed a rule opposite the choruses, spoke to the latter and conducted conversations with them. Thus an action, a drama, developed itself, and after the thing had been invented it was freed from the bacchanalian material and changed in contents as in masks; the whole cycle of heroic legends was gradually drawn on for dramatic treatment, and the founder of this Dionysian play was Thespis of Icaria.

Thus the Pisistratidæ collected the after-echoes of the epic, fostered the existing art of song in its full blossom, and called forth by their patronage a new and genuinely Attic branch of national art, that drama which united both lyric and epic. Besides this the best architects, Antistates, Callicrates, Antimachides, Porinus, and sculptors were busily employed on the Olympieum and Hecatompedon, and the best experts of their time at the great hydraulic constructions. The most eminent men of all faculties learnt to know each other and interchanged their experiences. But there was also no lack of friction and mutual jealousy, and Lasus did not shrink from publicly reproaching Onomacritus, who had attempted to serve his master by means of forged oracles, with abuse of the princely confidence, and thus to bring about his banishment.

Under such conditions, where everything depended on the ambitious whims of a self-seeking ruling family, how could it fail to happen that many underhand transactions should take place? Even in the arrangement of the Orphic teachings, the traces of wilful forgery were brought home to the sycophantic Onomacritus. Nevertheless the reputation of the Pisistratidæ still remains that of extreme integrity. They clearly recognised the vocation of Athens to unite and cultivate everything that was of national importance, and within a short time and by incredible industry they attained results which have never been effaced.

To the regent himself indeed, no more than to other tyrants was granted the peaceful enjoyment of his success; he continually felt that he trod on the brink of a volcano. Every popular commotion, every aspiring family, every unwonted stroke of fortune attained by an Athenian was pain and grief to him.

This is shown by the petty and superstitious means, which this powerful man employed to quiet his mind. He allowed himself to be pleased when Athenians who had conquered at Olympia caused the name of Pisistratus to be called out instead of their own, as was done by Cimon, called Coalemos, the half-brother of Miltiades, on the occasion of his second triumph (Ol. 63; 528 B.C.), when in recognition of this loyalty he was recalled from banishment. With anxious care inquiries were ceaselessly made after sayings of the gods which might give security of a long duration for the dynasty; and since the tyrant, being himself envious and jealous, felt that he was continually beset by the malevolence of strangers, he had the image of a locust fastened to the wall of his princely citadel, to serve as a defence against the evil glance of envy. Yet in advanced years, Pisistratus might confidently expect that his son and grandson, who were both gifted with talent for rule and took part in the government under him, would remain true to his policy to preserve the dynasty to which Athens was so much indebted at home and abroad. In this hope he died at a great age, surrounded by his family. (Ol. 63, 527 B.C.). Hippias succeeded to the power of the tyranny, in accordance with his father’s will; and the brothers, as they had promised their father, stood firmly by one another. To the gentle and refined Hipparchus there was no hardship in being second; he employed his position for the exercise of the peaceful side of power.[d]

FOOTNOTES

[16] The procession of the goddess of Reason in the first French Revolution solves the difficulty that perplexed Herodotus.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XIV. DEMOCRACY ESTABLISHED AT ATHENS

Pisistratus left three legitimate sons--Hippias, Hipparchus, and Thessalus: the general belief at Athens among the contemporaries of Thucydides was, that Hipparchus was the eldest of the three and had succeeded him; but the historian emphatically pronounces this to be a mistake, and certifies, upon his own responsibility, that Hippias was both eldest son and successor. Such an assurance from him, fortified by certain reasons in themselves not very conclusive, is sufficient ground for our belief, the more so as Herodotus countenances the same version. But we are surprised at such a degree of historical carelessness in the Athenian public, and seemingly even in Plato, about a matter both interesting and comparatively recent. In order to abate this surprise, and to explain how the name of Hipparchus came to supplant that of Hippias in the popular talk, Thucydides recounts the memorable story of Harmodius and Aristogiton.

Of these two Athenian citizens, both belonging to the ancient gens called Gephyræi, the former was a beautiful youth, attached to the latter by a mutual friendship and devoted intimacy which Grecian manners did not condemn. Hipparchus made repeated propositions to Harmodius, which were repelled, but which, on becoming known to Aristogiton, excited both his jealousy and his fears lest the disappointed suitor should employ force--fears justified by the proceedings not unusual with Grecian despots, and by the absence of all legal protection against outrage from such a quarter. Under these feelings, he began to look about, in the best way that he could, for some means of putting down the despotism. Meanwhile Hipparchus, though not entertaining any designs of violence, was so incensed at the refusal of Harmodius, that he could not be satisfied without doing something to insult or humiliate him. In order to conceal the motive from which the insult really proceeded, he offered it, not directly to Harmodius, but to his sister. He caused this young maiden to be one day summoned to take her station in a religious procession as one of the canephoræ, or basket-carriers, according to the practice usual at Athens; but when she arrived at the place where her fellow-maidens were assembled, she was dismissed with scorn as unworthy of so respectable a function, and the summons addressed to her was disavowed. An insult thus publicly offered filled Harmodius with indignation, and still further exasperated the feelings of Aristogiton: both of them, resolving at all hazards to put an end to the despotism, concerted means for aggression with a few select associates. They awaited the festival of the Great Panathenæa, wherein the body of the citizens were accustomed to march up in armed procession, with spear and shield, to the Acropolis; this being the only day on which an armed body could come together without suspicion. The conspirators appeared armed like the rest of the citizens, but carrying concealed daggers besides. Harmodius and Aristogiton undertook with their own hands to kill the two Pisistratidæ, while the rest promised to stand forward immediately for their protection against the foreign mercenaries; and though the whole number of persons engaged was small, they counted upon the spontaneous sympathies of the armed bystanders in an effort to regain their liberties, so soon as the blow should once be struck. The day of the festival having arrived, Hippias, with his foreign bodyguard around him, was marshalling the armed citizens for procession, in the Ceramicus without the gates, when Harmodius and Aristogiton approached with concealed daggers to execute their purpose. On coming near, they were thunder-struck to behold one of their own fellow-conspirators talking familiarly with Hippias, who was of easy access to every man; and they immediately concluded that the plot was betrayed. Expecting to be seized, and wrought up to a state of desperation, they resolved at least not to die without having revenged themselves on Hipparchus, whom they found within the city gates near the chapel called the Leocorion, and immediately slew him. His attendant guards killed Harmodius on the spot; while Aristogiton, rescued for the moment by the surrounding crowd, was afterwards taken, and perished in the tortures applied to make him disclose his accomplices.

The news flew quickly to Hippias in the Ceramicus, who heard it earlier than the armed citizens near him, awaiting his order for the commencement of the procession. With extraordinary self-command, he took advantage of this precious instant of foreknowledge, and advanced towards them, commanding them to drop their arms for a short time, and assemble on an adjoining ground. They unsuspectingly obeyed, and he immediately directed his guards to take possession of the vacant arms. He was now undisputed master, and enabled to seize the persons of all those citizens whom he mistrusted, especially all those who had daggers about them, which it was not the practice to carry in the Panathenaic procession.

Such is the memorable narrative of Harmodius and Aristogiton, peculiarly valuable inasmuch as it all comes from Thucydides. To possess great power, to be above legal restraint, to inspire extraordinary fear, is a privilege so much coveted by the giants among mankind, that we may well take notice of those cases in which it brings misfortune even upon themselves. The fear inspired by Hipparchus--of designs which he did not really entertain, but was likely to entertain, and competent to execute without hindrance--was here the grand cause of his destruction.

[Sidenote: [514-510 B.C.]]

The conspiracy here detailed happened in 514 B.C., during the thirteenth year of the reign of Hippias, which lasted four years longer, until 510 B.C. And these last four years, in the belief of the Athenian public, counted for his whole reign; nay, many of them made the still greater historical mistake of eliding these last four years altogether, and of supposing that the conspiracy of Harmodius and Aristogiton had deposed the Pisistratid government and liberated Athens. Both poets and philosophers shared this faith, which is distinctly put forth in the beautiful and popular scolion or song on the subject: the two friends are there celebrated as the authors of liberty at Athens--“they slew the despot and gave to Athens equal laws.” So inestimable a present was alone sufficient to enshrine in the minds of the subsequent democracy those who had sold their lives to purchase it: and we must further recollect that the intimate connection between the two, so repugnant to the modern reader, was regarded at Athens with sympathy, so that the story took hold of the Athenian mind by the vein of romance conjointly with that of patriotism. Harmodius and Aristogiton were afterwards commemorated both as the winners and as the protomartyrs of Athenian liberty. Statues were erected in their honour shortly after the final expulsion of the Pisistratidæ; immunity from taxes and public burdens was granted to the descendants of their families; and the speaker who proposed the abolition of such immunities, at a time when the number had been abusively multiplied, made his only special exception in favour of this respected lineage. And since the name of Hipparchus was universally notorious as the person slain, we discover how it was that he came to be considered by an uncritical public as the predominant member of the Pisistratid family,--the eldest son and successor of Pisistratus, the reigning despot,--to the comparative neglect of Hippias. The same public probably cherished many other anecdotes, not the less eagerly believed because they could not be authenticated, respecting this eventful period.

Whatever may have been the moderation of Hippias before, indignation at the death of his brother and fear for his own safety, now induced him to drop it altogether. It is attested both by Thucydides and Herodotus, and admits of no doubt, that his power was now employed harshly and cruelly--that he put to death a considerable number of citizens. We find also a statement, noway improbable in itself, and affirmed both in Pausanias and in Plutarch,--inferior authorities, yet still in this case sufficiently credible,--that he caused Leæna, the mistress of Aristogiton, to be tortured to death, in order to extort from her a knowledge of the secrets and accomplices of the latter. But as he could not but be sensible that this system of terrorism was full of peril to himself, so he looked out for shelter and support in case of being expelled from Athens; and with this view he sought to connect himself with Darius, king of Persia--a connection full of consequences to be hereafter developed. Æantides, son of Hippoclus the despot of Lampsacus on the Hellespont, stood high at this time in the favour of the Persian monarch, which induced Hippias to give him his daughter Archedice in marriage; no small honour to the Lampsacene, in the estimation of Thucydides. To explain how Hippias came to fix upon this town, however, it is necessary to say a few words on the foreign policy of the Pisistratidæ.

[Sidenote: [537-515 B.C.]]

The expedition of Miltiades to the Chersonesus, as described in the previous chapter, must have occurred early after the first usurpation of Pisistratus, since even his imprisonment by the Lampsacenes happened before the ruin of Crœsus (546 B.C.). But it was not till much later,--probably during the third and most powerful period of Pisistratus,--that the latter undertook his expedition against Sigeum in the Troad. This place appears to have fallen into the hands of the Mytileneans: Pisistratus retook it, and placed there his illegitimate son Hegesistratus as despot. The Mytileneans may have been enfeebled at this time (somewhere between 537-527 B.C.), not only by the strides of Persian conquest on the mainland, but also by the ruinous defeat which they suffered from Polycrates and the Samians. Hegesistratus maintained the place against various hostile attempts, throughout all the reign of Hippias, so that the Athenian possessions in those regions comprehended at this period both the Chersonesus and Sigeum. To the former of the two, Hippias sent out Miltiades, nephew of the first œcist, as governor, after the death of his brother Stesagoras. The new governor found much discontent in the peninsula, but succeeded in subduing it by entrapping and imprisoning the principal men in each town. He further took into his pay a regiment of five hundred mercenaries, and married Hegesipyle, daughter of the Thracian king Olorus. It appears to have been about 515 B.C. that this second Miltiades went out to the Chersonesus. He seems to have been obliged to quit it for a time, after the Scythian expedition of Darius, in consequence of having incurred the hostility of the Persians; but he was there from the beginning of the Ionic revolt until about 493 B.C., or two or three years before the battle of Marathon, on which occasion we shall find him acting-commander of the Athenian army.

Both the Chersonesus and Sigeum, though Athenian possessions, were, however, now tributary and dependent on Persia. And it was to this quarter that Hippias, during his last years of alarm, looked for support in the event of being expelled from Athens: he calculated upon Sigeum as a shelter, and upon Æantides, as well as Darius, as an ally. Neither the one nor the other failed him.

The same circumstances which alarmed Hippias, and rendered his dominion in Attica at once more oppressive and more odious, tended of course to raise the hopes of his enemies, the Athenian exiles, with the powerful Alcmæonidæ at their head. Believing the favourable moment to be come, they even ventured upon an invasion of Attica, and occupied a post called Leipsydrion in the mountain range of Parnes, which separates Attica from Bœotia. But their schemes altogether failed: Hippias defeated and drove them out of the country. His dominion now seemed confirmed, for the Lacedæmonians were on terms of intimate friendship with him; and Amyntas, king of Macedon, as well as the Thessalians were his allies. Yet the exiles whom he had beaten in the open field succeeded in an unexpected manœuvre, which, favoured by circumstances, proved his ruin.

[Sidenote: [548-514 B.C.]]

By an accident which had occurred in the year 548 B.C., the Delphian Temple was set on fire and burnt. To repair this grave loss was an object of solicitude to all Greece; but the outlay required was exceedingly heavy, and it appears to have been long before the money could be collected. The Amphictyons decreed that one-fourth of the cost should be borne by the Delphians themselves, who found themselves so heavily taxed by this assessment, that they sent envoys throughout all Greece to collect subscriptions in aid, and received, among other donations, from the Greek settlers in Egypt twenty minæ, besides a large present of alum from the Egyptian king Amasis [Aahmes II]: their munificent benefactor Crœsus fell a victim to the Persians in 546 B.C., so that his treasure was no longer open to them. The total sum required was three hundred talents, equal probably to about £115,000 sterling [or $575,000],--a prodigious amount to be collected from the dispersed Grecian cities, who acknowledged no common sovereign authority, and among whom the proportion reasonable to ask from each was so difficult to determine with satisfaction to all parties. At length, however, the money was collected, and the Amphictyons were in a situation to make a contract for the building of the temple. The Alcmæonidæ, who had been in exile ever since the third and final acquisition of power by Pisistratus, took the contract; and in executing it, they not only performed the work in the best manner, but even went much beyond the terms stipulated; employing Parian marble for the frontage, where the material prescribed to them was coarse stone. As was before remarked in the case of Pisistratus when he was in banishment, we are surprised to find exiles whose property had been confiscated so amply furnished with money--unless we are to suppose that Clisthenes the Alcmæonid, grandson of the Sicyonian Clisthenes, inherited through his mother wealth independent of Attica, and deposited it in the temple of the Samian Hera.

[Sidenote: [514-510 B.C.]]

To the Delphians, especially, the rebuilding of their temple on so superior a scale was the most essential of all services, and their gratitude towards the Alcmæonidæ was proportionally great. Partly through such a feeling, partly through pecuniary presents, Clisthenes was thus enabled to work the oracle for political purposes, and to call forth the powerful arm of Sparta against Hippias. Whenever any Spartan presented himself to consult the oracle, either on private or public business, the answer of the priestess was always in one strain, “Athens must be liberated.” The constant repetition of this mandate at length extorted from the piety of the Lacedæmonians a reluctant compliance. Reverence for the god overcame their strong feeling of friendship towards the Pisistratidæ, and Anchimolius son of Aster was despatched by sea to Athens, at the head of a Spartan force, to expel them. On landing at Phalerum, however, he found them already forewarned and prepared, as well as farther strengthened by one thousand horse specially demanded from their allies in Thessaly. Upon the plain of Phalerum, this latter force was found peculiarly effective, so that the division of Anchimolius was driven back to their ships with great loss and he himself slain. The defeated armament had probably been small, and its repulse only provoked the Lacedæmonians to send a larger, under the command of their king Cleomenes in person, who on this occasion marched into Attica by land. On reaching the plain of Athens, he was assailed by the Thessalian horse, but repelled them in so gallant a style, that they at once rode off and returned to their native country; abandoning their allies with a faithlessness not unfrequent in the Thessalian character. Cleomenes marched on to Athens without further resistance, and found himself, together with the Alcmæonids and the malcontent Athenians generally, in possession of the town. At that time there was no fortification except around the Acropolis, into which Hippias retired with his mercenaries and the citizens most faithful to him; having taken care to provision it well beforehand, so that it was not less secure against famine than against assault. He might have defied the besieging force, which was noway prepared for a long blockade; but, not altogether confiding in his position, he tried to send his children by stealth out of the country; and in this proceeding the children were taken prisoners. To procure their restoration, Hippias consented to all that was demanded of him, and withdrew from Attica to Sigeum in the Troad within the space of five days.

Thus fell the Pisistratid dynasty in 510 B.C., fifty years after the first usurpation of its founder. It was put down through the aid of foreigners, and those foreigners, too, wishing well to it in their hearts, though hostile from a mistaken feeling of divine injunction. Yet both the circumstances of its fall, and the course of events which followed, conspire to show that it possessed few attached friends in the country, and that the expulsion of Hippias was welcomed unanimously by the vast majority of Athenians. His family and chief partisans would accompany him into exile,--probably as a matter of course, without requiring any formal sentence of condemnation; and an altar was erected in the Acropolis, with a column hard by, commemorating both the past iniquity of the dethroned dynasty, and the names of all its members.

[Sidenote: [510-507 B.C.]]

With Hippias disappeared the mercenary Thracian garrison, upon which he and his father before him had leaned for defence as well as for enforcement of authority; and Cleomenes with his Lacedæmonian forces retired also, after staying only long enough to establish a personal friendship, productive subsequently of important consequences, between the Spartan king and the Athenian Isagoras. The Athenians were thus left to themselves, without any foreign interference to constrain them in their political arrangements.

It has been mentioned that the Pisistratidæ had for the most part respected the forms of the Solonian Constitution: the nine archons, and the probouleutic or preconsidering Senate of Four Hundred (both annually changed), still continued to subsist, together with occasional meetings of the people--or rather of such portion of the people as was comprised in the gentes, phratries, and four Ionic tribes. The timocratic classification of Solon (or quadruple scale of income and admeasurement of political franchises according to it) also continued to subsist--but all within the tether and subservient to the purposes of the ruling family, who always kept one of their number as real master, among the chief administrators, and always retained possession of the Acropolis as well as of the mercenary force.

That overawing pressure being now removed by the expulsion of Hippias, the enslaved forms became at once endued with freedom and reality. There appeared again what Attica had not known for thirty years, declared political parties, and pronounced opposition between two men as leaders,--on one side, Isagoras, son of Tisander, a person of illustrious descent,--on the other, Clisthenes the Alcmæonid, not less illustrious, and possessing at this moment a claim on the gratitude of his countrymen as the most persevering as well as the most effective foe of the dethroned despots. In what manner such opposition was carried on we are not told. It would seem to have been not altogether pacific; but at any rate, Clisthenes had the worst of it, and in consequence of this defeat, says the historian, “he took into partnership the people, who had been before excluded from everything.” His partnership with the people gave birth to the Athenian democracy: it was a real and important revolution.

GROTE’S ESTIMATE OF CLISTHENES THE REFORMER

[Sidenote: [507 B.C.]]

The political franchise, or the character of an Athenian citizen, both before and since Solon, had been confined to the primitive four Ionic tribes, each of which was an aggregate of so many close corporations or quasi-families--the gentes and the phratries. None of the residents in Attica, therefore, except those included in some gens or phratry, had any part in the political franchise. Such non-privileged residents were probably at all times numerous, and became more and more so by means of fresh settlers: moreover, they tended most to multiply in Athens and Piræus, where emigrants would commonly establish themselves. Clisthenes broke down the existing wall of privilege, and imparted the political franchise to the excluded mass. But this could not be done by enrolling them in new gentes or phratries, created in addition to the old; for the gentile tie was founded upon old faith and feeling, which, in the existing state of the Greek mind, could not be suddenly conjured up as a bond of union for comparative strangers: it could only be done by disconnecting the franchise altogether from the Ionic tribes as well as from the gentes which constituted them, and by redistributing the population into new tribes with a character and purpose exclusively political. Accordingly, Clisthenes abolished the four Ionic tribes, and created in their place ten new tribes founded upon a different principle, independent of the gentes and phratries. Each of his new tribes comprised a certain number of demes or cantons, with the enrolled proprietors and residents in each of them. The demes taken altogether included the entire surface of Attica, so that the Clisthenean Constitution admitted to the political franchise all the free native Athenians; and not merely these, but also many metics, and even some of the superior order of slaves. Putting out of sight the general body of slaves, and regarding only the free inhabitants, it was in point of fact a scheme approaching to universal suffrage, both political and judicial.

The slight and cursory manner in which Herodotus announces this memorable revolution tends to make us overlook its real importance. He dwells chiefly on the alteration in the number and names of the tribes: Clisthenes, he says, despised the Ionians so much, that he would not tolerate the continuance in Attica of the four tribes which prevailed in the Ionic cities, deriving their names from the four sons of Ion--just as his grandfather, the Sicyonian Clisthenes, hating the Dorians, had degraded and nicknamed the three Dorian tribes at Sicyon. Such is the representation of Herodotus, who seems himself to have entertained some contempt for the Ionians, and therefore to have suspected a similar feeling where it had no real existence. But the scope of Clisthenes was something far more extensive: he abolished the four ancient tribes, not because they were Ionic, but because they had become incommensurate with the existing condition of the Attic people, and because such abolition procured both for himself and for his political scheme new as well as hearty allies.

As soon as Hippias was expelled, the senate and the public assembly regained their efficiency. But had they been continued on the old footing, including none except members of the four tribes, these tribes would have been reinvested with a privilege which in reality they had so long lost, that its revival would have seemed an odious novelty, and the remaining population would probably not have submitted to it. If, in addition, we consider the political excitement of the moment, the restoration of one body of men from exile, and the departure of another body into exile, the outpouring of long-suppressed hatred, partly against these very forms, by the corruption of which the despot had reigned, we shall see that prudence as well as patriotism dictated the adoption of an enlarged scheme of government. Clisthenes had learned some wisdom during his long exile; and as he probably continued, for some time after the introduction of his new constitution, to be the chief adviser of his countrymen, we may consider their extraordinary success as a testimony to his prudence and skill not less than to their courage and unanimity. For, necessary as the change had become, it was not the less a shock to ancient Attic ideas. It radically altered the very idea of a tribe, which now became an aggregation of demes, not of gentes; and it thus broke up those associations, religious, social, and political, between the whole and the parts of the old system, which operated powerfully on the mind of every old-fashioned Athenian. The patricians at Rome, who composed the gentes and curiæ, and the plebs, who had no part in these corporations, formed for a long time two separate and opposing factions in the same city, each with its own separate organisation. It was only by slow degrees that the plebs gained ground.

So too in the Italian and German cities of the Middle Ages, the patrician families refused to part with their own separate political identity, when the guilds grew up by the side of them; even though forced to renounce a portion of their power, they continued to be a separate fraternity, and would not submit to be regimented anew, under an altered category and denomination, along with the traders who had grown into wealth and importance. But the reform of Clisthenes effected this change all at once, both as to the name and as to the reality. In some cases, indeed, that which had been the name of a gens was retained as the name of a deme, but even then the old gentiles were ranked indiscriminately among the remaining demots; and the Athenian people, politically considered, thus became one homogeneous whole, distributed for convenience into parts, numerically, locally, and politically equal. It is, however, to be remembered, that while the four Ionic tribes were abolished, the gentes and phratries which compose them were left untouched, and continued to subsist as family and religious associations, though carrying with them no political privilege.

The ten newly created tribes, arranged in an established order of precedence, were called: Erechtheis, Ægeis, Pandionis, Leontis, Acamantis, Œneis, Cecropis, Hippothoöntis, Æantis, Antiochis--names borrowed chiefly from the respected heroes of Attic legend. This number remained unaltered until the year 305 B.C., when it was increased to twelve by the addition of two new tribes, Antigonias and Demetrias, afterwards designated anew by the names of Ptolemais and Attalis. The mere names of these last two, borrowed from living kings and not from legendary heroes, betray the change from freedom to subservience at Athens. Each tribe comprised a certain number of demes--cantons, parishes, or townships--in Attica. But the total number of these demes is not distinctly ascertained.

There is another point, however, which is at once more certain, and more important to notice. The demes which Clisthenes assigned to each tribe were in no case all adjacent to each other; and therefore, the tribe, as a whole, did not correspond with any continuous portion of the territory, nor could it have any peculiar local interest, separate from the entire community. Such systematic avoidance of the factions arising out of neighbourhood will appear to have been more especially necessary, when we recollect that the quarrels of the Paralii, the Diacrii, the Pedieis, during the preceding century, had all been generated from local feud, though doubtless artfully fomented by individual ambition. Moreover, it was only by this same precaution that the local predominance of the city, and the formation of a city-interest distinct from that of the country, was obviated; which could hardly have failed to arise had the city by itself constituted either one deme or one tribe. Clisthenes distributed the city (or found it already distributed) into several demes, and those demes among several tribes; while Piræus and Phalerum, each constituting a separate deme, were also assigned to different tribes; so that there were no local advantages either to bestow predominance, or to create a struggle for predominance, of one tribe over the rest. Each deme had its own local interests to watch over; but the tribe was a mere aggregate of demes for political, military, and religious purposes, with no separate hopes or fears apart from the whole state. Each tribe had a chapel, sacred rites and festivals, and a common fund for such meetings, in honour of its eponymous hero, administered by members of its own choice; and the statues of all the ten eponymous heroes, fraternal patrons of the democracy, were planted in the most conspicuous part of the agora of Athens. In the future working of the Athenian government we shall trace no symptom of disquieting local factions--a capital amendment compared with the disputes of the preceding century, and traceable, in part, to the absence of border-relations between demes of the same tribe.

The deme now became the primitive constituent element of the commonwealth, both as to persons and as to property. It had its own demarch, its register of enrolled citizens, its collective property, its public meetings and religious ceremonies, its taxes levied and administered by itself. The register of qualified citizens was kept by the demarch, and the inscription of new citizens took place at the assembly of the demots, whose legitimate sons were enrolled on attaining the age of eighteen, and their adopted sons at any time when presented and sworn to by the adopting citizen. The citizenship could only be granted by a public vote of the people, but wealthy non-freemen were enabled sometimes to evade this law and purchase admission upon the register of some poor deme, probably by means of a fictitious adoption. At the meetings of the demots, the register was called over, and it sometimes happened that some names were expunged--in which case the party thus disfranchised had an appeal to the popular judicature. So great was the local administrative power, however, of these demes, that they are described as the substitute, under the Clisthenean system, for the naucraries under the Solonian and anti-Solonian. The trittyes and naucraries, though nominally preserved, and the latter (as some affirm) augmented in number from forty-eight to fifty, appear henceforward as of little public importance.

Clisthenes preserved, but at the same time modified and expanded, all the main features of Solon’s political constitution; the public assembly, or ecclesia,--the preconsidering senate, composed of members from all the tribes,--and the habit of annual election, as well as annual responsibility of magistrates, by and to the ecclesia. The full value must now have been felt of possessing such pre-existing institutions to build upon, at a moment of perplexity and dissension. But the Clisthenean ecclesia acquired new strength, and almost a new character, from the great increase of the number of citizens qualified to attend it; while the annually changed senate, instead of being composed of four hundred members taken in equal proportion from each of the old four tribes, was enlarged to five hundred, taken equally from each of the new ten tribes. It now comes before us, under the name of Senate of Five Hundred, as an active and indispensable body throughout the whole Athenian democracy: and the practice now seems to have begun (though the period of commencement cannot be decisively proved), of determining the names of the senators by lot. Both the senate thus constituted, and the public assembly, were far more popular and vigorous than they had been under the original arrangement of Solon.

The new constitution of the tribes, as it led to a change in the annual senate, so it transformed, no less directly, the military arrangements of the state, both as to soldiers and as to officers. The citizens called upon to serve in arms were now marshalled according to tribes--each tribe having its own taxiarchs as officers for the hoplites, and its own phylarch at the head of the horsemen. Moreover, there were now created for the first time ten strategi, or generals, one from each tribe; and two hipparchs, for the supreme command of the horsemen. Under the prior Athenian constitution it appears that the command of the military force had been vested in the third archon, or polemarch, no strategi then existing; and even after the latter had been created, under the Clisthenean constitution, the polemarch still retained a joint right of command along with them--as we are told at the battle of Marathon, where Callimachus the polemarch not only enjoyed an equal vote in the council of war along with the ten strategi, but even occupied the post of honour on the right wing. The ten generals, annually changed, are thus (like the ten tribes) a fruit of the Clisthenean constitution, which was at the same time powerfully strengthened and protected by such remodelling of the military force. The functions of the generals becoming more extensive as the democracy advanced, they seem to have acquired gradually not merely the direction of military and naval affairs, but also that of the foreign relations of the city generally,--while the nine archons, including the polemarch, were by degrees lowered down from that full executive and judicial competence which they had once enjoyed, to the simple ministry of police and preparatory justice. Encroached upon by the strategi on one side, they were also restricted in efficiency by the rise of the popular dicasteries or numerous jury-courts, on the other. We may be very sure that these popular dicasteries had not been permitted to meet or to act under the despotism of the Pisistratidæ, and that the judicial business of the city must then have been conducted partly by the senate of Areopagus, partly by the archons; perhaps with a nominal responsibility of the latter at the end of their year of office to an acquiescent ecclesia. And if we even assume it to be true, as some writers contend, that the habit of direct popular judicature, over and above this annual trial of responsibility, had been partially introduced by Solon, it must have been discontinued during the long coercion exercised by the supervening dynasty. But the outburst of popular spirit, which lent force to Clisthenes, doubtless carried the people into direct action as jurors in the aggregate heliæa, not less than as voters in the ecclesia; and the change was thus begun which contributed to degrade the archons from their primitive character as judges, into the lower function of preliminary examiners and presidents of a jury. Such convocation of numerous juries, beginning first with the aggregate body of sworn citizens above thirty years of age, and subsequently dividing them into separate bodies or panels, for trying particular causes, became gradually more frequent and more systematised: until at length, in the time of Pericles, it was made to carry a small pay, and stood out as one of the most prominent features of Athenian life.

The financial affairs of the city underwent at this epoch as complete a change as the military: in fact, the appointment of magistrates and officers by tens, one from each tribe, seems to have become the ordinary practice. From this time forward, the senate of Five Hundred steps far beyond its original duty of preparing matters for the discussion of the ecclesia: it embraces, besides, a large circle of administrative and general superintendence, which hardly admits of any definition. Its sittings become constant, with the exception of special holidays, and the year is distributed into ten portions called prytanies--the fifty senators of each tribe taking by turns the duty of constant attendance during one prytany, and receiving during that time the title of the Prytanes: the order of precedence among the tribes in these duties was annually determined by lot.

During those later times known to us through the great orators, the ecclesia, or formal assembly of the citizens, was convoked four times regularly during each prytany, or oftener if necessity required--usually by the senate, though the strategi had also the power of convoking it by their own authority. How often the ancient ecclesia had been convoked during the interval between Solon and Pisistratus, we cannot exactly say--probably but seldom during the year. But under the Pisistratidæ, its convocation had dwindled down into an inoperative formality; and the re-establishment of it by Clisthenes, not merely with plenary determining powers, but also under full notice and preparation of matters beforehand, together with the best securities for orderly procedure, was in itself a revolution impressive to the mind of every Athenian citizen. To render the ecclesia efficient, it was indispensable that its meetings should be both frequent and free. Men thus became trained to the duty both of speakers and hearers, and each man, while he felt that he exercised his share of influence on the decision, identified his own safety and happiness with the vote of the majority, and became familiarised with the notion of a sovereign authority which he neither could nor ought to resist. This is an idea new to the Athenian bosom; and with it came the feelings sanctifying free speech and equal law--words which no Athenian citizen ever afterwards heard unmoved: together with that sentiment of the entire commonwealth as one and indivisible, which always overruled, though it did not supplant, the local and cantonal specialties. It is not too much to say that these patriotic and ennobling impulses were a new product in the Athenian mind, to which nothing analogous occurs even in the time of Solon. They were kindled in part doubtless by the strong reaction against the Pisistratidæ, but still more by the fact that the opposing leader, Clisthenes, turned that transitory feeling to the best possible account, and gave to it a vigorous perpetuity, as well as a well-defined positive object, by the popular elements conspicuous in his constitution. His name makes less figure in history than we should expect, because he passed for the mere renovator of Solon’s scheme of government after it had been overthrown by Pisistratus. Probably he himself professed this object, since it would facilitate the success of his propositions: and if we confine ourselves to the letter of the case, the fact is in a great measure true, since the annual senate and the ecclesia are both Solonian--but both of them under his reform were clothed in totally new circumstances, and swelled into gigantic proportions. How vigorous was the burst of Athenian enthusiasm, altering instantaneously the position of Athens among the powers of Greece, we shall hear presently.

But it was not only the people formally installed in their ecclesia, who received from Clisthenes the real attributes of sovereignty; it was by him also that the people were first called into direct action as dicasts, or jurors. This custom may be said, in a certain limited sense, to have begun in the time of Solon, since that lawgiver invested the popular assembly with the power of pronouncing the judgment of accountability upon the archons after their year of office. Here, again, the building, afterwards so spacious and stately, was erected on a Solonian foundation, though it was not itself Solonian. That the popular dicasteries, in the elaborate forms in which they existed from Pericles downward, were introduced all at once by Clisthenes, it is impossible to believe; yet the steps by which they were gradually wrought out are not distinctly discoverable. It would rather seem, that at first only the aggregate body of citizens above thirty years of age exercised judicial functions, being specially convoked and sworn to try persons accused of public crimes, and when so employed bearing the name of the heliæa, or heliasts; private offences and disputes between man and man being still determined by individual magistrates in the city, and a considerable judicial power still residing in the senate of Areopagus. There is reason to believe that this was the state of things established by Clisthenes, and which afterwards came to be altered by the greater extent of judicial duty gradually accruing to the heliasts, so that it was necessary to subdivide the collective heliæa. According to the subdivision, as practised in the times best known, six thousand citizens above thirty years of age were annually selected by lot out of the whole number, six hundred from each of the ten tribes: five thousand of these citizens were arranged in ten panels or decuries of five hundred each, the remaining one thousand being reserved to fill up vacancies in case of death or absence among the former. The whole six thousand took a prescribed oath, couched in very striking words, and every man received a ticket inscribed with his own name as well as with a letter designating his decury. When there were causes or crimes ripe for trial, the thesmothets or six inferior archons, determined by lot, first, which decuries should sit, according to the number wanted--next, in which court, or under the presidency of what magistrate, the decury B or E should sit, so that it could not be known beforehand in what cause each would be judge. Each of these decuries sitting in judicature was called the heliæa, a name which belongs properly to the collective assembly of the people; this collective assembly having been itself the original judicature. We conceive that the practice of distributing this collective assembly, or heliæa, into sections of jurors for judicial duty, may have begun under one form or another soon after the reform of Clisthenes, since the direct interference of the people in public affairs tended more and more to increase. But it could only have been matured by degrees into that constant and systematic service which the pay of Pericles called forth at last in completeness. Under the last mentioned system the judicial competence of the archons was annulled, and the third archon, or polemarch, withdrawn from all military functions. Still, this had not been yet done at the time of the battle of Marathon, in which Callimachus the polemarch not only commanded along with the strategi, but enjoyed a sort of pre-eminence over them: nor had it been done during the year after the battle of Marathon, in which Aristides was archon--for the magisterial decisions of Aristides formed one of the principal foundations of his honourable surname, the Just.

With this question, as to the comparative extent of judicial power vested by Clisthenes in the popular dicastery and the archons, are in reality connected two others in Athenian constitutional law; relating, first, to the admissibility of all citizens for the post of archon--next, to the choosing of archons by lot. It is well known that, in the time of Pericles, the archons, and various other individual functionaries, had come to be chosen by lot--moreover, all citizens were legally admissible, and might give in their names to be drawn for by lot, subject to what was called the docimasy, or legal examination into their status of citizen, and into various moral and religious qualifications, before they took office; while at the same time the function of the archon had become nothing higher than preliminary examination of parties and witnesses for the dicastery, and presidence over it when afterwards assembled, together with the power of imposing by authority a fine of small amount upon inferior offenders.

Now all these three political arrangements hang essentially together. The great value of the lot, according to Grecian democratical ideas, was that it equalised the chance of office between rich and poor. But so long as the poor citizens were legally inadmissible, choice by lot could have no recommendation either to the rich or to the poor; in fact, it would be less democratical than election by the general mass of citizens, because the poor citizen would under the latter system enjoy an important right of interference by means of his suffrage, though he could not be elected himself. Again, choice by lot could never under any circumstances be applied to those posts where special competence, and a certain measure of attributes possessed only by a few, could not be dispensed with without obvious peril; nor was it ever applied, throughout the whole history of democratical Athens, to the strategi, or generals, who were always elected by show of hands of the assembled citizens. Accordingly, we may regard it as certain that, at the time when the archons first came to be chosen by lot, the superior and responsible duties once attached to that office had been, or were in course of being, detached from it, and transferred either to the popular dicasts or to the ten elected strategi: so that there remained to these archons only a routine of police and administration, important indeed to the state, yet such as could be executed by any citizen of average probity, diligence, and capacity. At least there was no obvious absurdity in thinking so; and the docimasy excluded from the office men of notoriously discreditable life, even after they might have drawn the successful lot. Pericles, though chosen strategus, year after year successively, was never archon; and it may even be doubted whether men of first-rate talents and ambition often gave in their names for the office. To those of smaller aspirations it was doubtless a source of importance, but it imposed troublesome labour, gave no pay, and entailed a certain degree of peril upon any archon who might have given offence to powerful men, when he came to pass through the trial of accountability which followed immediately upon his year of office. There was little to make the office acceptable either to very poor men, or to very rich and ambitious men; and between the middling persons who gave in their names, any one might be taken without great practical mischief, always assuming the two guarantees of the docimasy before, and accountability after, office. This was the conclusion--in our opinion a mistaken conclusion, and such as would find no favour at present--to which the democrats of Athens were conducted by their strenuous desire to equalise the chances of office for rich and poor. But their sentiment seems to have been satisfied by a partial enforcement of the lot to the choice of some offices,--especially the archons, as the primitive chief magistrates of the state,--without applying it to all, or to the most responsible and difficult. Nor would they have applied it to the archons, if it had been indispensably necessary that these magistrates should retain their original very serious duty of judging disputes and condemning offenders.

Now in regard to the eligibility of all Athenians indiscriminately to the office of archon, we find a clear and positive testimony as to the time when it was first introduced. Plutarch tells us that the oligarchical, but high-principled Aristides, was himself the proposer of this constitutional change--shortly after the battle of Platæa, with the consequent expulsion of the Persians from Greece, and the return of the refugee Athenians to their ruined city. Seldom has it happened in the history of mankind, that rich and poor have been so completely equalised as among the population of Athens in that memorable expatriation and heroic struggle. Nor are we at all surprised to hear that the mass of citizens, coming back with freshly kindled patriotism as well as with the consciousness that their country had only been recovered by the equal efforts of all, would no longer submit to be legally disqualified from any office of state. It was on this occasion that the constitution was first made really “common” to all, and that the archons, strategi, and all functionaries, first began to be chosen from all Athenians without any difference of legal eligibility. No mention is made of the lot in this important statement of Plutarch, which appears in every way worthy of credit, and which teaches us that, down to the invasion of Xerxes not only had the exclusive principle of the Solonian law of qualification continued in force (whereby the first three classes on the census were alone admitted to all individual offices, and the fourth or thetic class excluded), but also the archons had hitherto been elected by the citizens--not taken by lot.

Now for financial purposes, the quadruple census of Solon was retained long after this period, even beyond the Peloponnesian War and the oligarchy of Thirty. But we thus learn that Clisthenes in his constitution retained it for political purposes also, in part at least: he recognised the exclusion of the great mass of the citizens from all individual offices--such as the archon, the strategus, etc. In his time, probably, no complaints were raised on the subject. His constitution gave to the collective bodies--senate, ecclesia, and heliæa, or dicastery--a degree of power and importance such as they had never before known or imagined: and we may well suppose that the Athenian people of that day had no objection even to the proclaimed system and theory of being exclusively governed by men of wealth and station as individual magistrates--especially since many of the newly enfranchised citizens had been previously metics and slaves. Indeed, it is to be added that, even under the full democracy of later Athens, though the people had then become passionately attached to the theory of equal admissibility of all citizens to office, yet, in practice, poor men seldom obtained offices which were elected by the general vote, as will appear more fully in the course of this history.[17]

The choice of the strategi remained ever afterwards upon the footing on which Aristides thus placed it. But the present is not the time to enter into the modifications which Athens underwent during the generation after the battle of Platæa. They have been here briefly noticed for the purpose of reasoning back, in the absence of direct evidence, to Athens as it stood in the generation before that memorable battle, after the reform of Clisthenes. His reform, though highly democratical, stopped short of the mature democracy which prevailed from Pericles to Demosthenes, in three ways especially, among various others; and it is therefore sometimes considered by the later writers as an aristocratical constitution: (1) It still recognised the archons as judges to a considerable extent, and the third archon, or polemarch, as joint military commander along with the strategi. (2) It retained them as elected annually by the body of citizens, not as chosen by lot. (3) It still excluded the fourth class of the Solonian census from all individual office, the archonship among the rest. The Solonian law of exclusion, however, though retained in principle, was mitigated in practice thus far--that whereas Solon had rendered none but members of the highest class on the census (the pentakosiomedimni) eligible to the archonship, Clisthenes opened that dignity to all the first three classes, shutting out only the fourth. That he did this may be inferred from the fact that Aristides, assuredly not a rich man, became archon.

We are also inclined to believe that the senate of Five Hundred, as constituted by Clisthenes, was taken, not by election, but by lot, from the ten tribes, and that every citizen became eligible to it. Election for this purpose--that is, the privilege of annually electing a batch of fifty senators, all at once, by each tribe--would probably be thought more troublesome than valuable; nor do we hear of separate meetings of each tribe for purposes of election. Moreover, the office of senator was a collective, not an individual office; the shock, therefore, to the feelings of semi-democratised Athens, from the unpleasant idea of a poor man sitting among the fifty prytanes, would be less than if they conceived him as polemarch at the head of the right wing of the army, or as an archon administering justice.

A further difference between the constitution of Solon and that of Clisthenes is to be found in the position of the senate of Areopagus. Under the former, that senate had been the principal body in the state, and he had even enlarged its powers; under the latter, it must have been treated at first as an enemy, and kept down. For as it was composed only of all the past archons, and as, during the preceding thirty years, every archon had been a creature of the Pisistratidæ, the Areopagites collectively must have been both hostile and odious to Clisthenes and his partisans, perhaps a fraction of its members might even retire into exile with Hippias. Its influence must have been sensibly lessened by the change of party, until it came to be gradually filled by fresh archons springing from the bosom of the Clisthenean constitution. But during this important interval, the new-modelled senate of Five Hundred, and the popular assembly, stepped into that ascendency which they never afterwards lost. From the time of Clisthenes forward, the Areopagites cease to be the chief and prominent power in the state: yet they are still considerable; and when the second fill of the democratical tide took place, after the battle of Platæa, they became the focus of that which was then considered as the party of oligarchical resistance. We have already remarked that the archons, during the intermediate time (about 509-477 B.C.), were all elected by the ecclesia, not chosen by lot, and that the fourth (or poorest and most numerous) class on the census were by law then ineligible; while election at Athens, even when every citizen without exception was an elector and eligible, had a natural tendency to fall upon men of wealth and station. We thus see how it happened that the past archons, when united in the Senate of Areopagus, infused into that body the sympathies, prejudices, and interests of the richer classes. It was this which brought them into conflict with the more democratical party headed by Pericles and Ephialtes, in times when portions of the Clisthenean constitution had come to be discredited as too much imbued with oligarchy.

One other remarkable institution, distinctly ascribed to Clisthenes, yet remains to be noticed--the Ostracism. It is hardly too much to say that, without this protective process, none of the other institutions would have reached maturity.

OSTRACISM

By the ostracism, a citizen was banished without special accusation, trial, or defence, for a term of ten years--subsequently diminished to five. His property was not taken away, nor his reputation tainted; so that the penalty consisted solely in the banishment from his native city to some other Greek city. As to reputation, the ostracism was a compliment rather than otherwise; and so it was vividly felt to be, when, about ninety years after Clisthenes, the conspiracy between Nicias and Alcibiades fixed it upon Hyperbolus. The two former had both recommended the taking of an ostracising vote, each hoping to cause the banishment of the other; but before the day arrived, they accommodated the difference. To fire off the safety-gun of the republic against a person so little dangerous as Hyperbolus, was denounced as the prostitution of a great political ceremony: “It was not against such men as him,” said the comic writer, Plato, “that the oyster-shell (or potsherd) was intended to be used.” The process of ostracism was carried into effect by writing upon a shell, or potsherd, the name of the person whom a citizen thought it prudent for a time to banish; which shell, when deposited in the proper vessel, counted for a vote towards the sentence.

We have already observed that all the governments of the Grecian cities, when we compare them with that idea which a modern reader is apt to conceive of the measure of force belonging to a government, were essentially weak, the good as well as the bad--the democratical, the oligarchical, and the despotic. The force in the hands of any government, to cope with conspirators or mutineers, was extremely small, with the single exception of a despot surrounded by his mercenary troop; so that no tolerably sustained conspiracy or usurper could be put down except by the direct aid of the people in support of the government; which amounted to a dissolution, for the time, of constitutional authority, and was pregnant with reactionary consequences such as no man could foresee. To prevent powerful men from attempting usurpation was, therefore, of the greatest possible moment; and a despot or an oligarchy might exercise preventive means at pleasure, much sharper than the ostracism, such as the assassination of Cimon, as directed by the Pisistratidæ. At the very least, they might send away any one, from whom they apprehended attack or danger, without incurring even so much as the imputation of severity. But in a democracy, where arbitrary action of the magistrate was the thing of all others most dreaded, and where fixed laws, with trial and defence as preliminaries to punishment, were conceived by the ordinary citizen as the guarantees of his personal security and as the pride of his social condition--the creation of such an exceptional power presented serious difficulty. If we transport ourselves to the times of Clisthenes, immediately after the expulsion of the Pisistratidæ, when the working of the democratical machinery was as yet untried, we shall find this difficulty at its maximum; but we shall also find the necessity of vesting such a power somewhere absolutely imperative. For the great Athenian nobles had yet to learn the lesson of respect for any constitution; their past history had exhibited continual struggles between the armed factions of Megacles, Lycurgus, and Pisistratus, put down after a time by the superior force and alliances of the latter. And though Clisthenes, the son of Megacles, might be firmly disposed to renounce the example of his father, and to act as the faithful citizen of a fixed constitution--he would know but too well that the sons of his father’s companions and rivals would follow out ambitious purposes without any regard to the limits imposed by law, if ever they acquired sufficient partisans to present a fair prospect of success. Moreover, when any two candidates for power, with such reckless dispositions, came into a bitter personal rivalry, the motives to each of them, arising as well out of fear as out of ambition, to put down his opponent at any cost to the constitution, might well become irresistible, unless some impartial and discerning interference could arrest the strife in time. “If the Athenians were wise (Aristides is reported to have said, in the height and peril of his parliamentary struggle with Themistocles), they would cast both Themistocles and me into the barathrum.” And whoever reads the sad narrative of the Corcyræan sedition, in the third book of Thucydides, together with the reflections of the historian upon it, will trace the gradual exasperation of these party feuds, beginning even under democratical forms, until at length they break down the barriers of public as well as of private morality.

Against this chance of internal assailants Clisthenes had to protect the democratical constitution--first, by throwing impediments in their way and rendering it difficult for them to procure the requisite support; next, by eliminating them before any violent projects were ripe for execution. To do either the one or the other, it was necessary to provide such a constitution as would not only conciliate the good will, but kindle the passionate attachment of the mass of citizens, insomuch that not even any considerable minority should be deliberately inclined to alter it by force. It was necessary to create in the multitude, and through them to force upon the leading ambitious men, that rare and difficult sentiment which we may term a constitutional morality; a paramount reverence for the forms of the constitution, enforcing obedience to the authorities acting under and within those forms, yet combined with the habit of open speech, of action subject only to definite legal control, and unrestrained censure of those very authorities as to all their public acts--combined too with a perfect confidence in the bosom of every citizen, amidst the bitterness of party contest, that the forms of the constitution will be not less sacred in the eyes of his opponents than in his own. This coexistence of freedom and self-imposed restraint--of obedience to authority with unmeasured censure of the persons exercising it--may be found in the aristocracy of England (since about 1688) as well as in the democracy of the American United States: and because we are familiar with it, we are apt to suppose it a natural sentiment; though there seem to be few sentiments more difficult to establish and diffuse among a community, judging by the experience of history. We may see how imperfectly it exists at this day in the Swiss cantons; and the many violences of the first French Revolution illustrate, among various other lessons, the fatal effects arising from its absence, even among a people high in the scale of intelligence. Yet the diffusion of such constitutional morality, not merely among the majority of any community, but throughout the whole, is the indispensable condition of a government at once free and peaceable; since even any powerful and obstinate minority may render the working of free institutions impracticable, without being strong enough to conquer ascendency for themselves. Nothing less than unanimity, or so overwhelming a majority as to be tantamount to unanimity, on the cardinal point of respecting constitutional forms, even by those who do not wholly approve of them, can render the excitement of political passion bloodless, and yet expose all the authorities in the state to the full license of pacific criticism.

At the epoch of Clisthenes, which by a remarkable coincidence is the same as that of the regifugium at Rome, such constitutional morality, if it existed anywhere else, had certainly no place at Athens; and the first creation of it in any particular society must be esteemed an interesting historical fact. By the spirit of his reforms,--equal, popular, and comprehensive, far beyond the previous experience of Athenians,--he secured the hearty attachment of the body of citizens; but from the first generation of leading men, under the nascent democracy, and with such precedents as they had to look back upon, no self-imposed limits to ambition could be expected: and the problem required was to eliminate beforehand any one about to transgress these limits, so as to escape the necessity of putting him down afterwards, with all that bloodshed and reaction, in the midst of which the free working of the constitution would be suspended at least, if not irrevocably extinguished. To acquire such influence as would render him dangerous under democratical forms, a man must stand in evidence before the public, so as to afford some reasonable means of judging of his character and purposes; and the security which Clisthenes provided was, to call in the positive judgment of the citizens respecting his future promise purely and simply, so that they might not remain too long neutral between two formidable political rivals--pursuant in a certain way to the Solonian proclamation against neutrality in a sedition, as we have already remarked in a former chapter. He incorporated in the constitution itself the principle of privilegium (to employ the Roman phrase, which signifies, not a peculiar favour granted to any one, but a peculiar inconvenience imposed), yet only under circumstances solemn and well defined, with full notice and discussion beforehand, and by the positive secret vote of a large proportion of the citizens. “No law shall be made against any single citizen, without the same being made against all Athenian citizens; unless it shall so seem good to six thousand citizens voting secretly.” Such was that general principle of the constitution, under which the ostracism was a particular case. Before the vote of ostracism could be taken, a case was to be made out in the senate and the public assembly to justify it. In the sixth prytany of the year, these two bodies debated and determined whether the state of the republic was menacing enough to call for such an exceptional measure. If they decided in the affirmative, a day was named, the agora was railed round, with ten entrances left for the citizens of each tribe, and ten separate casks or vessels for depositing the suffrages, which consisted of a shell, or a potsherd, with the name of the person written on it whom each citizen designed to banish. At the end of the day, the number of votes was summed up, and if six thousand votes were found to have been given against any one person, that person was ostracised; if not, the ceremony ended in nothing. Ten days were allowed to him for settling his affairs, after which he was required to depart from Attica for ten years, but retained his property, and suffered no other penalty.

It was not the maxim at Athens to escape the errors of the people, by calling in the different errors, and the sinister interest besides, of an extra-popular or privileged few; nor was any third course open, since the principles of representative government were not understood, nor indeed conveniently applicable to very small communities. Beyond the judgment of the people--so the Athenians felt--there was no appeal; and their grand study was to surround the delivery of that judgment with the best securities for rectitude and the best preservatives against haste, passion, or private corruption. Whatever measure of good government could not be obtained in that way, could not, in their opinion, be obtained at all. We shall illustrate the Athenian proceedings on this head more fully when we come to speak of the working of their mature democracy: meanwhile, in respect to this grand protection of the nascent democracy,--the vote of ostracism,--it will be found that the securities devised by Clisthenes, for making the sentence effectual against the really dangerous man, and against no one else, display not less foresight than patriotism. The main object was, to render the voting an expression of deliberate public feeling, as distinguished from mere factious antipathy: the large minimum of votes required, one-fourth of the entire citizen population, went far to insure this effect, the more so, since each vote, taken as it was in a secret manner, counted unequivocally for the expression of a genuine and independent sentiment, and could neither be coerced nor bought. Then again, Clisthenes did not permit the process of ostracising to be opened against any one citizen exclusively. If opened at all, every one without exception was exposed to the sentence; so that the friends of Themistocles could not invoke it against Aristides, nor those of the latter against the former, without exposing their own leader to the same chance of exile. It was not likely to be invoked at all, therefore, until exasperation had proceeded so far as to render both parties insensible to this chance--the precise index of that growing internecine hostility, which the ostracism prevented from coming to a head. Nor could it even then be ratified, unless a case was shown to convince the more neutral portion of the senate and the ecclesia: moreover, after all, the ecclesia did not itself ostracise, but a future day was named, and the whole body of the citizens were solemnly invited to vote. It was in this way that security was taken not only for making the ostracism effectual in protecting the constitution, but to hinder it from being employed for any other purpose. And we must recollect that it exercised its tutelary influence, not merely on those occasions when it was actually employed, but by the mere knowledge that it might be employed, and by the restraining effect which that knowledge produced on the conduct of the great men. Again, the ostracism, though essentially of an exceptional nature, was yet an exception sanctified and limited by the constitution itself; so that the citizen, in giving his ostracising vote, did not in any way depart from the constitution or lose his reverence for it. The issue placed before him--“Is there any man whom you think vitally dangerous to the State? if so, whom?”--though vague, was yet raised directly and legally. Had there been no ostracism, it might probably have been raised both indirectly and illegally, on the occasion of some special imputed crime of a suspected political leader, when accused before a court of justice.

Care was taken to divest the ostracism of all painful consequence except what was inseparable from exile; and this is not one of the least proofs of the wisdom with which it was devised. Most certainly, it never deprived the public of candidates for political influence: and when we consider the small amount of individual evil which it inflicted,--evil too diminished, in the cases of Cimon and Aristides, by a reactionary sentiment which augmented their subsequent popularity after return,--two remarks will be quite sufficient to offer in the way of justification. First, it completely produced its intended effect; for the democracy grew up from infancy to manhood without a single attempt to overthrow it by force--a result, upon which no reflecting contemporary of Clisthenes could have ventured to calculate. Next, through such tranquil working of the democratical forms, a constitutional morality quite sufficiently complete was produced among the leading Athenians, to enable the people after a certain time to dispense with that exceptional security which the ostracism offered. To the nascent democracy, it was absolutely indispensable; to the growing yet militant democracy, it was salutary; but the full-grown democracy both could and did stand without it. The ostracism passed upon Hyperbolus, about ninety years after Clisthenes, was the last occasion of its employment. And even this can hardly be considered as a serious instance: it was a trick concerted between two distinguished Athenians (Nicias and Alcibiades), to turn to their own political account a process already coming to be antiquated. Nor would such a manœuvre have been possible, if the contemporary Athenian citizens had been penetrated with the same serious feeling of the value of ostracism as a safeguard of democracy, as had been once entertained by their fathers and grandfathers. Between Clisthenes and Hyperbolus, we hear of about ten different persons as having been banished by ostracism. First of all, Hipparchus of the deme Cholargus, the son of Charmus, a relative of the recently expelled Pisistratid despots; then Aristides, Themistocles, Cimon, and Thucydides son of Melesias, all of them renowned political leaders; also Alcibiades and Megacles (the paternal and maternal grandfathers of the distinguished Alcibiades), and Callias, belonging to another eminent family at Athens; lastly, Damon, the preceptor of Pericles in poetry and music, and eminent for his acquisitions in philosophy. In this last case comes out the vulgar side of humanity, aristocratical as well as democratical; for with both, the process of philosophy and the persons of philosophers are wont to be alike unpopular. Even Clisthenes himself is said to be ostracised under his own law, and Xanthippus; but both upon authority too weak to trust. Miltiades was not ostracised at all, but tried and punished for misconduct in his command.

We should hardly have said so much about this memorable and peculiar institution of Clisthenes, if the erroneous accusations against the Athenian democracy--of envy, injustice, and ill-treatment of their superior men, had not been greatly founded upon it, and if such criticisms had not passed from ancient times to modern with little examination. In monarchical governments, a pretender to the throne, numbering a certain amount of supporters, is, as a matter of course, excluded from the country. No man treats this as any extravagant injustice, yet it is the parallel of the ostracism, with a stronger case in favour of the latter, inasmuch as the change from one regal dynasty to another does not of necessity overthrow all the collateral institutions and securities of the country. Plutarch has affirmed that the ostracism arose from the envy and jealousy inherent in a democracy, and not from justifiable fears--an observation often repeated, yet not the less demonstrably untrue. Not merely because ostracism so worked as often to increase the influence of that political leader whose rival it removed, but still more, because, if the fact had been as Plutarch says, this institution would have continued as long as the democracy; whereas it finished with the banishment of Hyperbolus, at a period when the government was more decisively democratical than it had been in the time of Clisthenes.

It was, in truth, a product altogether of fear and insecurity, on the part both of the democracy and its best friends--fear perfectly well-grounded, and only appearing needless because the precautions taken prevented attack. So soon as the diffusion of a constitutional morality had placed the mass of the citizens above all serious fear of an aggressive usurper the ostracism was discontinued. And doubtless the feeling, that it might safely be dispensed with, must have been strengthened by the long ascendancy of Pericles, by the spectacle of the greatest statesman whom Athens ever produced, acting steadily within the limits of the constitution; as well as by the ill-success of his two opponents, Cimon and Thucydides,--aided by numerous partisans and by the great comic writers, at a period when comedy was a power in the state such as it has never been before or since,--in their attempts to get him ostracised. They succeeded in fanning up the ordinary antipathy of the citizens towards philosophers, so far as to procure the ostracism of his friend and teacher Damon: but Pericles himself, to repeat the complaint of his bitter enemy, the comic poet Cratinus, “was out of the reach of the oyster-shell.” If Pericles was not conceived to be dangerous to the constitution, none of his successors were at all likely to be so regarded. Damon and Hyperbolus were the two last persons ostracised: both of them were cases, and the only cases, of an unequivocal abuse of the institution, because, whatever the grounds of displeasure against them may have been, it is impossible to conceive either of them as menacing to the state--whereas all the other known sufferers were men of such position and power, that the six or eight thousand citizens who inscribed each name on the shell, or at least a large proportion of them, may well have done so under the most conscientious belief that they were guarding the constitution against real danger. Such a change in the character of the persons ostracised plainly evinces that the ostracism had become dissevered from that genuine patriotic prudence which originally rendered it both legitimate and popular. It had served for two generations an inestimable tutelary purpose,--it lived to be twice dishonoured,--and then passed, by universal acquiescence, into matter of history.

A process analogous to the ostracism subsisted at Argos, at Syracuse, and in some other Grecian democracies. Aristotle states that it was abused for factious purposes: and at Syracuse, where it was introduced after the expulsion of the Gelonian dynasty, Diodorus affirms that it was so unjustly and profusely applied, as to deter persons of wealth and station from taking any part in public affairs; for which reason it was speedily discontinued. We have no particulars to enable us to appreciate this general statement. But we cannot safely infer that because the ostracism worked on the whole well at Athens, it must necessarily have worked well in other states--the more so, as we do not know whether it was surrounded with the same precautionary formalities, nor whether it even required the same large minimum of votes to make it effective. This latter guarantee, so valuable in regard to an institution essentially easy to abuse, is not noticed by Diodorus in his brief account of the petalism--so the process was denominated at Syracuse.

THE DEMOCRACY ESTABLISHED

Such was the first Athenian democracy, engendered as well by the reaction against Hippias and his dynasty as by the memorable partnership, whether spontaneous or compulsory, between Clisthenes and the unfranchised multitude. It is to be distinguished, both from the mitigated oligarchy established by Solon before, and from the full-grown and symmetrical democracy which prevailed afterwards from the beginning of the Peloponnesian War towards the close of the career of Pericles. It was, indeed, a striking revolution, impressed upon the citizen not less by the sentiments to which it appealed than by the visible change which it made in political and social life. He saw himself marshalled in the ranks of hoplites, alongside of new companions in arms; he was enrolled in a new register, and his property in a new schedule, in his deme and by his demarch, an officer before unknown; he found the year distributed afresh, for all legal purposes, into ten parts bearing the name of prytanies, each marked by a solemn and free-spoken ecclesia, at which he had a right to be present; that ecclesia was convoked and presided by senators called prytanes, members of a senate novel both as to number and distribution; his political duties were now performed as member of a tribe, designated by a name not before pronounced in common Attic life, connected with one of ten heroes whose statues he now for the first time saw in the agora, and associating him with fellow-tribesmen from all parts of Attica. All these and many others were sensible novelties, felt in the daily proceedings of the citizen. But the great novelty of all was the authentic recognition of the ten new tribes as a sovereign demos, or people, apart from all specialties of phratric or gentile origin, with free speech and equal law; retaining no distinction except the four classes of the Solonian property-schedule with their gradations of eligibility. To a considerable proportion of citizens this great novelty was still further endeared by the fact that it had raised them out of the degraded position of metics and slaves; and to the large majority of all the citizens, it furnished a splendid political idea, profoundly impressive to the Greek mind, capable of calling forth the most ardent attachment as well as the most devoted sense of active obligation and obedience. We have now to see how their newly-created patriotism manifested itself.

Clisthenes and his new constitution carried with them so completely the popular favour, that Isagoras had no other way of opposing it except by calling in the interference of Cleomenes and the Lacedæmonians. Cleomenes listened the more readily to this call, as he was reported to have been on an intimate footing with the wife of Isagoras. He prepared to come to Athens; but his first aim was to deprive the democracy of its great leader Clisthenes, who, as belonging to the Alcmæonid family, was supposed to be tainted with the inherited sin of his great-grandfather Megacles, the destroyer of the usurper Cylon. Cleomenes sent a herald to Athens, demanding the expulsion “of the accursed,”--so this family were called by their enemies, and so they continued to be called eighty years afterwards, when the same manœuvre was practised by the Lacedæmonians of that day against Pericles. This requisition had been recommended by Isagoras, and was so well-timed that Clisthenes, not venturing to disobey it, retired voluntarily, so that Cleomenes, though arriving at Athens only with a small force, found himself master of the city. At the instigation of Isagoras, he sent into exile seven hundred families, selected from the chief partisans of Clisthenes: his next attempt was to dissolve the new senate of Five Hundred and place the whole government in the hands of three hundred adherents of the chief whose cause he espoused. But now was seen the spirit infused into the people by their new constitution. At the time of the first usurpation of Pisistratus, the senate of that day had not only not resisted, but even lent themselves to the scheme. But the new senate of Clisthenes resolutely refused to submit to dissolution, and the citizens manifested themselves in a way at once so hostile and so determined, that Cleomenes and Isagoras were altogether baffled. They were compelled to retire into the Acropolis and stand upon the defensive; and this symptom of weakness was the signal for a general rising of the Athenians, who besieged the Spartan king on the holy rock. He had evidently come without any expectation of finding, or any means of overpowering, resistance; for at the end of two days his provisions were exhausted, and he was forced to capitulate. He and his Lacedæmonians, as well as Isagoras, were allowed to retire to Sparta; but the Athenians of the party captured along with him were imprisoned, condemned, and executed by the people.

Clisthenes, with the seven hundred exiled families, was immediately recalled, and his new constitution materially strengthened by this first success. Yet the prospect of renewed Spartan attack was sufficiently serious to induce him to send envoys to Artaphernes, the Persian satrap at Sardis, soliciting the admission of Athens into the Persian alliance: he probably feared the intrigues of the expelled Hippias in the same quarter. Artaphernes, having first informed himself who the Athenians were, and where they dwelt, replied that, if they chose to send earth and water to the king of Persia, they might be received as allies, but upon no other condition. Such were the feelings of alarm under which the envoys had quitted Athens, that they went the length of promising this unqualified token of submission. But their countrymen, on their return, disavowed them with scorn and indignation.

TROUBLE WITH THEBES

It was at this time that the first connection began between Athens and the little Bœotian town of Platæa, situated on the northern slope of the range of Cithæron, between that mountain and the river Asopus, on the road from Athens to Thebes; and it is upon this first occasion that we become acquainted with the Bœotians and their polities. The Bœotian federation has already been briefly described, as composed of some twelve or thirteen autonomous towns under the headship of Thebes, which was, or professed to have been, their mother-city. Platæa had been, so the Thebans affirmed, their latest foundation; it was ill-used by them, and discontented with the alliance. Accordingly, as Cleomenes was on his way back from Athens, the Platæans took the opportunity of addressing themselves to him, craved the protection of Sparta against Thebes, and surrendered their town and territory without reserve. The Spartan king, having no motive to undertake a trust which promised nothing but trouble, advised them to solicit the protection of Athens, as nearer and more accessible for them in case of need. He foresaw that this would embroil the Athenians with Bœotia; and such anticipation was in fact his chief motive for giving the advice, which the Platæans followed.

[Sidenote: [506 B.C.]]

Selecting an occasion of public sacrifice at Athens, they despatched thither envoys, who sat down as suppliants at the altar, surrendered their town to Athens, and implored protection against Thebes. Such an appeal was not to be resisted, and protection was promised; it was soon needed, for the Thebans invaded the Platæan territory, and an Athenian force marched to defend it. Battle was about to be joined, when the Corinthians interposed with their mediation, which was accepted by both parties. They decided altogether in favour of Platæa, pronouncing that the Thebans had no right to employ force against any seceding member of the Bœotian federation. But the Thebans, finding the decision against them, refused to abide by it, and, attacking the Athenians on their return, sustained a complete defeat: the latter avenged this breach of faith by joining to Platæa the portion of Theban territory south of the Asopus, and making that river the limit between the two. By such success, however, the Athenians gained nothing, except the enmity of Bœotia, as Cleomenes had foreseen. Their alliance with Platæa, long continued, and presenting in the course of this history several incidents touching to our sympathies, will be found, if we except one splendid occasion, productive only of burden to the one party, yet insufficient as a protection to the other.

Meanwhile Cleomenes had returned to Sparta full of resentment against the Athenians, and resolved on punishing them, as well as on establishing his friend Isagoras as despot over them. Having been taught, however, by humiliating experience, that this was no easy achievement, he would not make the attempt, without having assembled a considerable force; he summoned allies from all the various states of the Peloponnesus, yet without venturing to inform them what he was about to undertake. He at the same time concerted measures with the Bœotians, and with the Chalcidians of Eubœa, for a simultaneous invasion of Attica on all sides. It appears that he had greater confidence in their hostile dispositions towards Athens than in those of the Peloponnesians; he was not afraid to acquaint them with his design, and probably the Bœotians were incensed with the recent interference of Athens in the affair of Platæa. As soon as these preparations were completed, the two kings of Sparta, Cleomenes and Demaratus, put themselves at the head of the united Peloponnesian force, marched into Attica, and advanced as far as Eleusis on the way to Athens. But when the allies came to know the purpose for which they were to be employed, a spirit of dissatisfaction manifested itself among them. They had no unfriendly sentiment towards Athens; and the Corinthians especially, favourably disposed rather than otherwise towards that city, resolved to proceed no further, withdrew their contingent from the camp, and returned home. At the same time, king Demaratus, either sharing in the general dissatisfaction, or moved by some grudge against his colleague which had not before manifested itself, renounced the undertaking also. And these two examples, operating upon the pre-existing sentiment of the allies generally, caused the whole camp to break up and return home without striking a blow.

We may here remark that this is the first instance known in which Sparta appears in act as recognised head of an obligatory Peloponnesian alliance, summoning contingents from the cities to be placed under the command of her king. Her headship, previously recognised in theory, passes now into act, but in an unsatisfactory manner, so as to prove the necessity of precaution and concert beforehand, which will be found not long wanting.

Pursuant to the scheme concerted, the Bœotians and Chalcidians attacked Attica at the same time that Cleomenes entered it. The former seized Œnoe and Hysiæ, the frontier demes of Attica on the side towards Platæa, while the latter assailed the northeastern frontier, which faces Eubœa. Invaded on three sides, the Athenians were in serious danger, and were compelled to concentrate all their forces at Eleusis against Cleomenes, leaving the Bœotians and Chalcidians unopposed. But the unexpected breaking up of the invading army from the Peloponnesus proved their rescue, and enabled them to turn the whole of their attention to the other frontier. They marched into Bœotia to the strait called Euripus, which separates it from Eubœa, intending to prevent the junction of the Bœotians and Chalcidians, and to attack the latter first apart. But the arrival of the Bœotians caused an alteration of their scheme; they attacked the Bœotians first, and gained a victory of the most complete character, killing a large number, and capturing seven hundred prisoners. On the very same day they crossed over to Eubœa, attacked the Chalcidians, and gained another victory so decisive that it at once terminated the war. Many Chalcidians were taken, as well as Bœotians, and conveyed in chains to Athens, where after a certain detention they were at last ransomed for two minæ per man; and the tenth of the sum thus raised was employed in the fabrication of a chariot and four horses in bronze, which was placed in the Acropolis to commemorate the victory. Herodotus saw this trophy when he was at Athens. He saw too, what was a still more speaking trophy, the actual chains in which the prisoners had been fettered, exhibiting in their appearance the damage undergone when the Acropolis was burnt by Xerxes: an inscription of four lines described the offerings and recorded the victory out of which they had sprung.

Another consequence of some moment arose out of this victory. The Athenians planted a body of four thousand of their citizens as cleruchs (lot-holders) or settlers upon the lands of the wealthy Chalcidian oligarchy called the hippobotæ--proprietors probably in the fertile plain of Lelantum, between Chalcis and Eretria. This is a system which we shall find hereafter extensively followed out by the Athenians in the days of their power; partly with the view of providing for their poorer citizens, partly to serve as garrison among a population either hostile or of doubtful fidelity. These Attic cleruchs (we can find no other name by which to speak of them) did not lose their birthright as Athenian citizens: they were not colonists in the Grecian sense, and they are known by a totally different name, but they corresponded very nearly to the colonies formally planted out on the conquered lands by Rome. The increase of the poorer population was always more or less painfully felt in every Grecian city. For though the aggregate population never seems to have increased very fast, yet the multiplication of children in poor families caused the subdivision of the smaller lots of land, until at last they became insufficient for a maintenance; and the persons thus impoverished found it difficult to obtain subsistence in other ways, more especially as the labour for the richer classes was so much performed by imported slaves. The numerous cleruchies sent out by Athens, of which this to Eubœa was the first, arose in a great measure out of the multiplication of the poorer population, which her extended power was employed in providing for. Her subsequent proceedings with a view to the same object will not be always found so justifiable as this now before us, which grew naturally, according to the ideas of the time, out of her success against the Chalcidians.

[Sidenote: [498-491 B.C.]]

The war between Athens, however, and Thebes with her Bœotian allies, still continued, to the great and repeated disadvantage of the latter, until at length the Thebans in despair sent to ask advice of the Delphian oracle, and were directed to “solicit aid from those nearest to them.” “How (they replied) are we to obey? Our nearest neighbours, of Tanagra, Coronea, and Thespiæ, are now, and have been from the beginning, lending us all the aid in their power.” An ingenious Theban, however, coming to the relief of his perplexed fellow-citizens, dived into the depths of legend and brought up a happy meaning. “Those nearest to us (he said) are the inhabitants of Ægina: for Thebe (the eponym of Thebes) and Ægina (the eponym of that island) were both sisters, daughters of Asopus: let us send to crave assistance from the Æginetans.” If his subtle interpretation (founded upon their descent from the same legendary progenitors) did not at once convince all who heard it, at least no one had any better to suggest; and envoys were at once sent to the Æginetans, who, in reply to a petition founded on legendary claims, sent to the help of the Thebans a reinforcement of legendary, but venerated, auxiliaries--the Æacid heroes. We are left to suppose that their effigies are here meant. It was in vain, however, that the glory and the supposed presence of the Æacids, Telamon and Peleus, were introduced into the Theban camp. Victory still continued on the side of Athens; and the discouraged Thebans again sent to Ægina, restoring the heroes, and praying for aid of a character more human and positive. Their request was granted, and the Æginetans commenced war against Athens without even the decent preliminary of a herald and declaration.

This remarkable embassy first brings us into acquaintance with the Dorians of Ægina,--oligarchical, wealthy, commercial, and powerful at sea, even in the earliest days; more analogous to Corinth than to any of the other cities called Dorian. The hostility which they now began without provocation against Athens,--repressed by Sparta at the critical moment of the battle of Marathon, and hushed for a while by the common dangers of the Persian invasion under Xerxes; then again breaking out,--was appeased only with the conquest of the island about twenty years after that event, and with the expulsion and destruction of its inhabitants some years later. There had been indeed, according to Herodotus, a feud of great antiquity between Athens and Ægina, of which he gives the account in a singular narrative, blending together religion, politics, exposition of ancient customs, etc.; but at the time when the Thebans solicited aid from Ægina, the latter was at peace with Athens. The Æginetans employed their fleet, powerful for that day, in ravaging Phalerum and the maritime demes of Attica; nor had the Athenians as yet any fleet to resist them. It is probable that the desired effect was produced, of diverting a portion of the Athenian force from the war against Bœotia, and thus partially relieving Thebes. But the war of Athens against both of them continued for a considerable time, though we have no information respecting its details.

Meanwhile the attention of Athens was called off from these combined enemies by a more menacing cloud, which threatened to burst upon her from the side of Sparta. Cleomenes and his countrymen, full of resentment at the late inglorious desertion of Eleusis, were yet more incensed by the discovery, which appears to have been then recently made, that the injunctions of the Delphian priestess for the expulsion of Hippias from Athens had been fraudulently procured. Moreover, Cleomenes, when shut up in the Acropolis of Athens with Isagoras, had found there various prophecies previously treasured up by the Pisistratidæ, many of which foreshadowed events highly disastrous to Sparta. And while the recent brilliant manifestations of courage, and repeated victories, on the part of Athens, seemed to indicate that such prophecies might perhaps be realised, Sparta had to reproach herself, that, from the foolish and mischievous conduct of Cleomenes, she had undone the effect of her previous aid against the Pisistratidæ, and thus lost that return of gratitude which the Athenians would otherwise have testified. Under such impressions, the Spartan authorities took the remarkable step of sending for Hippias from his residence at Sigeum to the Peloponnesus, and of summoning deputies from all their allies to meet him at Sparta.

The convocation thus summoned deserves notice as the commencement of a new era in Grecian politics. The previous expedition of Cleomenes against Attica presents to us the first known example of Spartan headship passing from theory into act: that expedition miscarried because the allies, though willing to follow, would not follow blindly, nor be made the instruments of executing purposes repugnant to their feelings. Sparta had now learned the necessity, in order to insure their hearty concurrence, of letting them know what she contemplated, so as to ascertain at least that she had no decided opposition to apprehend. Here, then, is the third stage in the spontaneous movement of Greece towards a systematic conjunction, however imperfect, of its many autonomous units. First we have Spartan headship suggested in theory, from a concourse of circumstances which attract to her the admiration of all Greece,--power, unrivalled training, undisturbed antiquity, etc.; next, the theory passes into act, yet rude and shapeless; lastly, the act becomes clothed with formalities, and preceded by discussion and determination. The first convocation of the allies at Sparta, for the purpose of having a common object submitted to their consideration, may well be regarded as an important event in Grecian political history. The proceedings at the convocation are no less important, as an indication of the way in which the Greeks of that day felt and acted, and must be borne in mind as a contrast with times hereafter to be described.

Hippias having been presented to the assembled allies, the Spartans expressed their sorrow for having dethroned him, their resentment and alarm at the new born insolence of Athens, already tasted by her immediate neighbours, and menacing to every state represented in the convocation, and their anxiety to restore Hippias, not less as a reparation for past wrong, than as a means, through his rule, of keeping Athens low and dependent. But the proposition, though emanating from Sparta, was listened to by the allies with one common sentiment of repugnance. They had no sympathy for Hippias, no dislike, still less any fear, of Athens, and a profound detestation of the character of a despot. The spirit which had animated the armed contingents at Eleusis now reappeared among the deputies at Sparta, and the Corinthians again took the initiative. Their deputy Sosicles protested against the project in the fiercest and most indignant strain: no language can be stronger than that of the long harangue which Herodotus puts into his mouth, wherein the bitter recollections prevalent at Corinth respecting Cypselus and Periander are poured forth. “Surely, heaven and earth are about to change places,--the fish are coming to dwell on dry land, and mankind going to inhabit the sea,--when you, Spartans, propose to subvert the popular governments, and to set up in the cities that wicked and bloody thing called a Despot. First try what it is, for yourselves at Sparta, and then force it upon others if you can: you have not tasted its calamities as we have, and you take very good care to keep it away from yourselves. We adjure you, by the common gods of Hellas,--plant not despots in her cities: if you persist in a scheme so wicked, know that the Corinthians will not second you.”

This animated appeal was received with a shout of approbation and sympathy on the part of the allies. All with one accord united with Sosicles in adjuring the Lacedæmonians “not to revolutionise any Hellenic city.” No one listened to Hippias when he replied, warning the Corinthians that the time would come, when they, more than any one else, would dread and abhor the Athenian democracy, and wish the Pisistratidæ back again. He knew well, says Herodotus, that this would be, for he was better acquainted with the prophecies than any man. But no one then believed him, and he was forced to take his departure back to Sigeum: the Spartans not venturing to espouse his cause against the determined sentiment of the allies.

That determined sentiment deserves notice, because it marks the present period of the Hellenic mind; fifty years later it will be found materially altered. Aversion to single-headed rule, and bitter recollection of men like Cypselus and Periander are now the chords which thrill in an assembly of Grecian deputies: the idea of a revolution, implying thereby a great and comprehensive change, of which the party using the word disapproves, consists in substituting a permanent One in place of those periodical magistrates and assemblies which were the common attribute of oligarchy and democracy: the antithesis between these last two is as yet in the background, nor does there prevail either fear of Athens or hatred of the Athenian democracy. But when we turn to the period immediately before the Peloponnesian War, we find the order of precedence between these two sentiments reversed. The anti-monarchical feeling has not perished, but has been overlaid by other and more recent political antipathies,--the antithesis between democracy and oligarchy having become, not indeed the only sentiment, but the uppermost sentiment, in the minds of Grecian politicians generally, and the soul of active party movement. Moreover, a hatred of the most deadly character has grown up against Athens and her democracy, especially in the grandsons of those very Corinthians who now stand forward as her sympathising friends. The remarkable change of feeling here mentioned is nowhere so strikingly exhibited as when we contrast the address of the Corinthian Sosicles, just narrated, with the speech of the Corinthian envoys at Sparta, immediately antecedent to the Peloponnesian War, as given to us in Thucydides. It will hereafter be fully explained by the intermediate events, by the growth of Athenian power, and by the still more miraculous development of Athenian energy.

[Sidenote: [494-490 B.C.]]

Such development, the fruit of the fresh-planted democracy as well as the seed for its sustentation and aggrandisement, continued progressive during the whole period just adverted to. But the first unexpected burst of it, under the Clisthenean constitution, and after the expulsion of Hippias, is described by Herodotus in terms too emphatic to be omitted. After narrating the successive victories of the Athenians over both Bœotians and Chalcidians, that historian proceeds: “Thus did the Athenians grow in strength. And we may find proof, not merely in this instance but everywhere else, how valuable a thing freedom is: since even the Athenians, while under a despot, were not superior in war to any of their surrounding neighbours, but, so soon as they got rid of their despots, became by far the first of all. These things show that while kept down by one man, they were slack and timid, like men working for a master; but when they were liberated, every single man became eager in exertions for his own benefit.” The same comparison reappears a short time afterwards, where he tells us, that “the Athenians when free, felt themselves a match for Sparta; but while kept down by any man under a despotism, were feeble and apt for submission.”

Stronger expressions cannot be found to depict the rapid improvement wrought in the Athenian people by their new democracy. Of course this did not arise merely from suspension of previous cruelties, or better laws, or better administration. These, indeed, were essential conditions, but the active transforming cause here was the principle and system of which such amendments formed the detail: the grand and new idea of the sovereign people, composed of free and equal citizens,--or liberty and equality, to use words which so profoundly moved the French nation half a century ago. It was this comprehensive political idea which acted with electric effect upon the Athenians, creating within them a host of sentiments, motives, sympathies, and capacities to which they had before been strangers. Democracy in Grecian antiquity possessed the privilege, not only of kindling an earnest and unanimous attachment to the constitution in the bosoms of the citizens, but also of creating an energy of public and private action, such as could never be obtained under an oligarchy, where the utmost that could be hoped for was a passive acquiescence and obedience. Mr. Burke has remarked that the mass of the people are generally very indifferent about theories of government; but such indifference--although improvements in the practical working of all governments tend to foster it--is hardly to be expected among any people who exhibit decided mental activity and spirit on other matters; and the reverse was unquestionably true, in the year 500 B.C., among the communities of ancient Greece. Theories of government were there anything but a dead letter; they were connected with emotions of the strongest as well as of the most opposite character. The theory of a permanent ruling One, for example, was universally odious: that of a ruling Few, though acquiesced in, was never positively attractive, unless either where it was associated with the maintenance of peculiar education and habits, as at Sparta, or where it presented itself as the only antithesis to democracy, the latter having by peculiar circumstances become an object of terror. But the theory of democracy was pre-eminently seductive; creating in the mass of the citizens an intense positive attachment, and disposing them to voluntary action and suffering on its behalf, such as no coercion on the part of other governments could extort.

Herodotus, in his comparison of the three sorts of government, puts in the front rank of the advantages of democracy, “its most splendid name and promise,”--its power of enlisting the hearts of the citizens in support of their constitution, and of providing for all a common bond of union and fraternity. This is what even democracy did not always do: but it was what no other government in Greece could do: a reason alone sufficient to stamp it as the best government, and presenting the greatest chance of beneficent results, for a Grecian community. Among the Athenian citizens, certainly, it produced a strength and unanimity of positive political sentiment, such as has rarely been seen in the history of mankind, which excites our surprise and admiration the more when we compare it with the apathy which had preceded,--and which is even applied as the natural state of the public mind in Solon’s famous proclamation against neutrality in a sedition. Because democracy happens to be unpalatable to some modern readers, they have been accustomed to look upon the sentiment here described only in its least honourable manifestations,--in the caricatures of Aristophanes, or in the empty commonplaces of rhetorical declaimers. But it is not in this way that the force, the earnestness, or the binding value of democratical sentiment at Athens is to be measured. We must listen to it as it comes from the lips of Pericles, while he is strenuously enforcing upon the people those active duties for which it both implanted the stimulus and supplied the courage; or from the oligarchical Nicias in the harbour of Syracuse, when he is endeavouring to revive the courage of his despairing troops for one last death-struggle, and when he appeals to their democratical patriotism as to the only flame yet alive and burning even in that moment of agony. From the time of Clisthenes downward, the creation of this new mighty impulse makes an entire revolution in the Athenian character. And if the change still stood out in so prominent a manner before the eyes of Herodotus, much more must it have been felt by the contemporaries among whom it occurred.

The attachment of an Athenian citizen to his democratical constitution comprised two distinct veins of sentiment: first, his rights, protection, and advantages derived from it; next, his obligations of exertion and sacrifice towards it and with reference to it. Neither of these two veins of sentiment was ever wholly absent; but according as the one or the other was present at different times in varying proportions, the patriotism of the citizen was a very different feeling. That which Herodotus remarks is, the extraordinary efforts of heart and hand which the Athenians suddenly displayed,--the efficacy of the active sentiment throughout the bulk of the citizens; and we shall observe even more memorable evidences of the same phenomenon in tracing down the history from Clisthenes to the end of the Peloponnesian War: we shall trace a series of events and motives eminently calculated to stimulate that self-imposed labour and discipline which the early democracy had first called forth. But when we advance farther down, from the restoration of the democracy after the Thirty Tyrants to the time of Demosthenes, we venture upon this brief anticipation, in the conviction that one period of Grecian history can be thoroughly understood only by contrasting it with another,--we shall find a sensible change in Athenian patriotism. The active sentiment of obligation is comparatively inoperative, the citizen, it is true, has a keen sense of the value of the democracy as protecting him and insuring to him valuable rights, and he is, moreover, willing to perform his ordinary sphere of legal duties towards it; but he looks upon it as a thing established, and capable of maintaining itself in a due measure of foreign ascendency, without any such personal efforts as those which his forefathers cheerfully imposed upon themselves. The orations of Demosthenes contain melancholy proofs of such altered tone of patriotism,--of that languor, paralysis, and waiting for others to act, which preceded the catastrophe of Chæronea, notwithstanding an unabated attachment to the democracy as a source of protection and good government. That same preternatural activity which the allies of Sparta, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, both denounced and admired in the Athenians, is noted by the orator as now belonging to their enemy Philip.

Such variations in the scale of national energy pervade history, modern as well as ancient, but in regard to Grecian history, especially, they can never be overlooked. For a certain measure, not only of positive political attachment, but also of active self-devotion, military readiness, and personal effort, was the indispensable condition of maintaining Hellenic autonomy, either in Athens or elsewhere; and became so more than ever when the Macedonians were once organised under an enterprising and semi-Hellenised prince. The democracy was the first creative cause of that astonishing personal and many-sided energy which marked the Athenian character, for a century downwards from Clisthenes.

That the same ultra-Hellenic activity did not longer continue, is referable to other causes, which will be hereafter in part explained. No system of government, even supposing it to be very much better and more faultless than the Athenian democracy, can ever pretend to accomplish its legitimate end apart from the personal character of the people, or to supersede the necessity of individual virtue and vigour.

During the half-century immediately preceding the battle of Chæronea, the Athenians had lost that remarkable energy which distinguished them during the first century of their democracy, and had fallen much more nearly to a level with the other Greeks, in common with whom they were obliged to yield to the pressure of a foreign enemy. We here briefly notice their last period of languor, in contrast with the first burst of democratical fervour under Clisthenes, now opening--a feeling which will be found, as we proceed, to continue for a longer period than could have been reasonably anticipated, but which was too high-strung to become a perpetual and inherent attribute of any community.[b]

FOOTNOTES

[17] So in the Italian republics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the nobles long continued to possess the exclusive right of being elected to the consulate and the great offices of state, even after those offices had come to be elected by the people: the habitual misrule and oppression of the nobles gradually put an end to this right, and even created in many towns a resolution positively to exclude them. At Milan, towards the end of the twelfth century, the twelve consuls, with the Podestat, possessed all the powers of government: these consuls were nominated by one hundred electors chosen by and among the people.

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