Cleisthenes PDF

Cleisthenes Cleisthenes was not, like Solon, a man to whom extraordinary power was granted. Having been first archon in 525, he could not aim at that office again. Everything he wanted to carry out had to be confirmed by the assembly, so that his reforms were at the same time the first example of d...

Cleisthenes Cleisthenes was not, like Solon, a man to whom extraordinary power was granted. Having been first archon in 525, he could not aim at that office again. Everything he wanted to carry out had to be confirmed by the assembly, so that his reforms were at the same time the first example of democratic methods. He was opposed by the relatives and supporters of the Peisistratids, and above all by the majority of the aristocracy. But if he certainly tried to gain and to maintain power for himself and the Alcmaeonids, that was not his only, probably not even his chief, aim. Power was to him a means of creating the constitutional framework for a society on the verge of becoming democratic, and of securing the unity of the state without a tyrant. Naturally he tried to find support among the non-nobles, by outlining plans which would give them a decisive say in the state. He soon restored law and order, and then embarked on the creation of a new social order and a new form of government. How long it took to complete his work, we do not know. Nor do we have evidence of the gradual progress he must have made; we see only the final picture of a new organization of the state. So far the organization of the Athenian people had largely rested – through the clans and phratries – on the first two, though we have seen that regional influences had also played a part. With Cleisthenes, the local principle became predominant, but he immediately found ways and means to restrict it. The local principle predominated over the state organization, through the new ten phylae of which we shall say more soon; it prevailed, above all, through the small communities, the demes, which were to form the basis on which a new order of a largely artificial character was to be erected. It was this union of different elements, the combination of theory and tradition, of a new division of the people, based on the villages and boroughs, with essential old institutions, that gave Cleisthenes’ new order the chance of keeping city and rural population together and building up a new democratic society. He was to provide the framework within which the Athenian community was to live for centuries. Cleisthenes, no doubt, was a great innovator. The demes were local communities of very different size. Many had been ancient places of human habitation, and had naturally gathered a certain amount of local traditions; others were created by Cleisthenes, partly by uniting several villages into one new deme. It is an open question to what extent, or whether at all, the boundaries of the demes were fixed. The essential thing with the demes was the people, and not the land. Even so, a good deal of preparation was needed, especially in the way of a general survey of the land. According to later sources (cf. Strabo), the total number of demes was 174; we do not know how many of these existed in Cleisthenes’ time, but the majority probably did. Each was made into a political unit with a local assembly, a treasury, and a leading official, the demarchus. There is no evidence as to what the original method of the latter’s election was, but there is little doubt about the democratic character of these small political units. Each deme kept a register in which every citizen was inscribed when he reached the age of eighteen. This was now the necessary legal pro- cedure by which a man would become an Athenian citizen. The decisive point for him, at any rate, was that everyone admitted, whether a man of the city or a farmer in the country, was a citizen in his own right, as a demesman and consequently as a member of one of the new phylae. The name of the deme, the demotikon, was in future to be put after a man’s name, instead of his father’s name, the patronymikon, so that no social differentiation resulted from the nomenclature. It was the seal on Cleisthenes’ largely successful attempt to create only one type of citizen. The demes were allocated to ten local phylae or tribes, which, as the structural foundation of practically all political business, were to replace the ancient four phylae. The whole character of the new order was secular and rational. The phylae served as the framework for the elections to practically all political institutions, above all to the council and to the increasingly numerous boards of magistrates. For the first time in history, as far as we know, a state was organized according to the decimal system. The duodecimal system with the traditional figures of three, four, and twelve lost its political, though not its religious, importance, and to fit the nine archons into the new scheme, the scribe of the thesmothetae was added as the tenth (AP). The army too was organized on the basis of ten regiments, one from each phyle, and the local principle made the call-up and formation of the army units far easier. The decimal structure, with its freedom from traditional bonds, representing a union of political and scientific thought, became a symbol of democracy. In creating the ten phylae, Cleisthenes was chiefly guided by two principles: one was that the phylae should be roughly equal in population; the other that each should represent a mixture of all classes, a cross-section of the whole people. If that were achieved, it would mean the destruction of the preponderance, local as well as general, of the large landowners, most of whom belonged to the Eupatrids, and would create the unity of state and people which the country so badly needed. In order to secure these aims, Cleisthenes divided the whole of Attica into three sections called city (asty), shore (paralia), and inland (mesogaia). Each phyle was composed of three parts, the trittyes (= thirds), one from each of the three sections of the whole country. It seems obvious that Cleisthenes depended on, but also deliberately altered, the traditional division into plain, shore, and hill. The city received the place it deserved in any division, while the two other parts more or less followed an easy and definite regional separation. The city part included a fair amount of land outside the walls, namely the plain of Athens, but also some coastline including Phaleron harbour. The urban trittyes served at the same time as demes (or the other way round), while the other trittyes usually received their names from the largest deme within their frontiers. Even so, it is certain that the arrangement was not haphazard, and Aristotle’s view that the three parts of each phyle were put together by lot is clearly mistaken. In many cases we can still recognize the tendency to match larger and smaller trittyes, and that is what we should expect. An additional factor may have been a desire to cut through territories in which individual clans or religious ties had a particularly strong hold, or, on the other hand, to strengthen the position of Cleisthenes’ own clan, the Alcmaeonids. The main issue was the will to bring together in each phyle men of very different social standing, above all, the urban and rural populations. The general description by Aristotle that Cleisthenes wanted ‘to mix the people’, and thus to create a unified body of citizens, fits the traceable facts best. His laws were called nomoi as an expression of norms imposed on and by the people; they were the ‘statutes’ of Athens. That is also confirmed by the name which Cleisthenes gave his new order: isonomia, equal distribution and thus equality among the citizens, equality before the law as well as equal political rights, equal share in the state. The unity of the state again found its living symbol in the goddess Athena. Cleisthenes finally established the uniform coinage of the ‘owls’. A man was to belong to his deme for all time to come, and his descendants kept the same demotikon, whether he or they were still resident in that deme or not. Thus the local community was no longer of the same importance in the future, while the original mixture within the electoral and administrative bodies was preserved. This was most important because gradually a considerable number of people must have moved to the city, where all major public affairs were dealt with. If a man still belonged to his deme, no matter where he lived, the neighbourhood principle was no longer in full force, but neither had it been replaced by new bonds of kinship. If anything now counted beside the local principle, it was the individual citizen whose political activity had sometimes few ties left with any larger groups. The administration of the state was both centralized and locally dispersed, but essentially unified. The city, as we said, became the very centre of all state affairs. There was the ecclesia, the sovereign assembly of the people, ruled by the principle of ‘one man, one vote’. It soon found a new meeting-place on the Pnyx, west of the hill of the Areopagus, where about 500 B.C. a platform terrace with the bema, the speaker’s stone, was carved out of the rock. There were the archons, still elected from the upper class, as the highest officials, and the Areopagus, the council of ex-archons, whose activities (though hardly its prestige) were reduced by Cleisthenes’ new council of the Five Hundred (boulē), which was to become the truly ruling body of the democratic state. It found its home in a new house at the agora, which saw much building activity in the early fifth century. Every phyle sent fifty men to the council, chosen by lot from and by the demes and according to the size of the population of the deme. The council acted both as a probuleutic body to bring proposals before the assembly, and as an advisory body to the magistrates. Naturally it was bound by the final decisions of the ecclesia, but in practice it acted as the central administrative committee. For the day-to-day business, however, a body of five hundred men was far too large. For that reason, and also in order to give as many citizens as possible a share in the government, the fifty members from each individual tribe, the prytaneis, served in turn for one tenth of the year, and each prytany took the name of its phyle. No citizen was allowed to sit more than twice in the council. Each prytany of fifty had a chairman (epistates) who served for twenty-four hours. Thus there was a general and continuous turnover, and there were comparatively few citizens who had not sat at least once in the council as one of the prytans. The system became a political school for the majority of Athenian citizens. Archon and Areopagus, both still in the hands of the upper class, were practically the rulers of the state; however, that proved only to be the transition to a new constitutional order. It was later that the new council surpassed its rival completely. Ten new army leaders, the strategi, were elected for the first time. The higher and lower offices – higher and lower in their importance and competence, not as parts of a hierarchy, for there was none – were filled by election in the assembly; voting was in tribal units taken from the demes. Apart from the archons and some technical, especially military, offices, the magistrates were chosen by using the lot. Perhaps it was Solon in the election of the jurors to the heliaea. Cleisthenes, at any rate, extended the same method of appointment to a number of newly created popular courts (dikasteria). Sortition was also used, in combination with a preceding selection by vote (prokrisis), if not by Solon, certainly before Cleisthenes. That alone should suffice to show that election by lot was not necessarily a democratic measure. Its political character depended in each single case on the size and composition of the body from which people were chosen by lot. When, for instance, in AP, it is said that ‘the treasures of Athena are chosen by lot, one from each phyle, from the pentacosiomedimni according to the Solonian law which is still in force’, we understand that Solon caused the treasures to be elected by lot from the highest income class only; possibly there was a preselection as well. Cleisthenes used the same method on a far larger scale as the basis of his new order. When there was a prokrisis, it took place in the demes. But the general rule now was direct appointment by lot, and it is obvious that, with social divisions largely removed, the method had definitely become a democratic one. The officials, while increasing in numbers, lost a good deal of importance. The effect was the same. As far as possible, personal influence and abuses were prevented, and the only restriction (if we may call it so) was that nobody could be put up as a candidate who had not presented himself for the election. Appointment by lot was an expression of the equality of the citizens, and though it left much to chance, it did work. This was made possible because the average citizen who applied for an office would have at least a minimum of political and administrative experience, either from frequent attendance in the assembly or from a year’s service on the council; above all, he belonged to the various community bodies of deme and tribe, of phratry and guild. Moreover, in any office he would only be one out of ten, and the individual official, usually elected for one year, was of minor importance. The officials were the executive organ of the will of the people and of the council as its committee, and after their term they had to render account of their use of public money. In this way a method which might look almost senseless could be justified as a good and useful democratic measure. Within that mixed society which Cleisthenes had created and which was most effective in the prytaneis, deriving from one phyle only, democracy began to work almost at once. At the same time the archons kept their power, or indeed regained what they had lost under the tyrants. Thus the policy of the state was still determined by members of the upper class, though they had to get the consent of the assembly and its steering committee, the council. Among Cleisthenes’ democratic measures Aristotle (AP) mentions especially the law of ostracism. Later in the same chapter and in his Politics he defines it as a measure against men who were too powerful, and in particular against possible tyrants and their followers. We know that a corresponding institution existed in other states as well, probably all of them democracies at the time when it was introduced. The rules at Athens were that each year in the main assembly of the sixth prytany the people were asked whether they wanted an ostracism; if the vote (probably without debate) was in the affirmative, the decisive voting would take place later that year. By ostracism one man was sent into exile for ten years, without losing either his citizenship or his property. The procedure was that every citizen could write a name on a sherd (ostrakon); it was a secret ballot, and simple majority decided. A quorum of six thousand votes was needed, a fairly high figure and a reasonable safeguard against easy misuse. As an appeal to public opinion, it was a measure which combined resoluteness of purpose with mildness of means. The removal of one man from the political scene must have derived from a situation in which this man threatened the peace of the community. As Aristotle expressly tells us, ostracism was designed to prevent internal strife, a stasis. Thucydides states that normally the measure was practised because of the power and authority of some individual. It is, of course, possible that the use of ostracism changed with the changes of political conditions; but nobody could risk asking the people, unless he was himself in a strong position and very popular, while his opponent threatened the unity of people and state. That was indeed Cleisthenes’ own situation when he was the champion of the people, and possible danger threatened either from a possible tyrant or a faction under a hostile leader. Cleisthenes naturally wanted to protect democracy, which was his own work, and to prevent a return of tyrannis or oligarchy. At the same time by his new measure he stopped the expulsion of whole clans, which had been frequent in former struggles. He actually managed well enough with his reforms without using the law of ostracism, but he could never be sure whether a more dangerous situation might not rise again. The nature of the new law, on the other hand, its boldness, its rational clarity, its moderation, fits well into the general picture of Cleisthenes’ statesmanship. Earlier we have mentioned that in, or shortly after, 501–500 ten strategi were elected for the first time (AP). It is generally assumed, and is likely in itself, though Aristotle does not make it clear, that henceforth the election was made by the whole people, not by each tribe separately as before. The army at that time was led by the polemarch, one of the archons, who changed every year. However, since the army must have been divided into ten units, according to the ten phylae, it is reasonable to assume that the institution of ten regimental commanders goes back to an early stage of Cleisthenes’ reforms. We do not know for certain what they were called at first; but since it is unlikely that the posts were at once doubled, we can assume that the ten strategi were the original ten army commanders. The fact that they were elected year by year, and not chosen by lot, gave them a standing that was eventually to overreach that of the polemarch, as became to some extent clear in the battle of Marathon. It is unlikely that they immediately gained political influence as well; the decisive change occurred as late as 487–486, when the archons were first chosen by lot and lost most of their power. Athens was in the pangs of becoming a democratic state and at the same time fighting enemies from within and without. She showed astonishing strength, and we can be sure that, apart from Cleisthenes’ leadership, this was due to the introduction of freedom and democracy (cf Hdt). New forces were released when new strata of society emerged. Hand in hand with the growth of the numbers of citizens went the growth of the hoplite army, a process which reflected a higher standard of living. It was also during this period that the Athenians first founded a new type of colony, the cleruchies, where the colonists remained citizens of Athens; such a colony was not an independent polis but rather an extension of Athenian territory and power. Athens also extended her frontiers by including two places near the Boeotian border, the small town of Hysiae, north of Cithaeron and on the way to Plataea, and Oropus with its fertile plain along the Euripus. We do not know how long Cleisthenes was at the helm. He must have died about 500 at the latest; he did his great work as a man approaching the seventies, displaying wisdom no less than energy. The Alcmaeonids and some other noble families kept a prominent position for the time being; they could do so within the framework of a state and a society which were both growing more democratic all the time. Cleisthenes’ isonomia, equality of rights among all the citizens, was not yet rule by the people, that is democracy, but it was speedily approaching it. Resting on religious as well as local community life and working through the sovereign assembly of the whole body of citizens, it was indeed rule by majority, however shy and inhibited this majority may still have been for some time. It was helped by the two councils, both bearing great responsibilities, by the wealthy citizens accepting special obligations from time to time, the leitourgiai, and by many ordinary citizens serving as temporary officials. There were to be constitutional and social changes, but Cleisthenes had provided the essential framework for centuries of Athenian democracy.