This is also the period in which Athens began to be an organized naval power: Salamis became definitively Athenian in the course of the 6th century (tradition credits its annexation to both Solon and Peisistratus), with consequences already noted. The island was secured by the installation of what was probably Athens’s first cleruchy, a settlement of Athenians with defense functions. Again, it is then that one finds definite mention of the first Athenian triremes, which formed a small private fleet in possession of Miltiades.
The trireme, a late Archaic invention (the first Greek ones are said to have been built at Corinth), was a formidable weapon of war pulled by 170 rowers and carrying 30 other effectives. A full-sized working trireme, first launched in Greece in 1987 and demonstrated in 1993 on the River Thames in London, proved beyond any further debate that triremes were operated by three banks of oars (rather than by three men to an oar). More generally, its size, technological sophistication, and visual impact make it possible to understand Classical Athens’s psychological and actual domination of the seas. A proper Peisistratid navy is implied by the tradition that Peisistratus intervened on Naxos and “purified” the small but symbolically important island of Delos, a great Ionian centre. This purification involved ritual cleansing ceremonies and the digging up of graves. As with Eleusis, however, this was deliberate exploitation of religion for the purposes of political assertion.
Elsewhere in Attica also, the Peisistratids interested themselves in organized religion. A literary text first published in 1982 states explicitly what was always probable, that Peisistratus actively supported the local cult of Artemis Brauronia (an aspect of Artemis concerned with female transitions) in eastern Attica (the locality from which Peisistratus himself came) and so helped to make it the fully civic cult it is in Aristophanes’ play of 411, Lysistrata. Too much, however, should not be credited to Peisistratus; it has been protested that the relationship between local and city cults in Attica was always one of reciprocity and dialogue. Nevertheless, the explicit evidence about Peisistratus’s care for his home cult of Brauron, and the permanent military importance of Eleusis on the way to Peisistratus’s enemies in the Peloponnese, make it plausible to suppose a heightening of interest in these two particular sanctuaries precisely in the tyrannical period.
Peisistratid religious and artistic propaganda, and in particular the extent to which the evidence of painted pottery can be used by the political historian, is a modern scholarly battlefield. It has been suggested, on the basis of this sort of evidence, that Peisistratus deliberately identified himself with Heracles, the legendary son of Zeus and Alcmene, and that this is reflected on vase paintings. Yet there are problems; it may be wrong, for reasons already noted, to accord to painted pottery the importance required for the theory. Certainly it needs to be proved that potters, not a numerous or powerful group at any time, had the kind of social standing that would give weight to their “views” as represented on vases, which price lists show were dirt-cheap. In addition, there are particular difficulties about supposing that any man, tyrant or not, could at this early date get away with posing as a god.
One is on firmer ground with the Peisistratid building program reflecting not only the tyrant’s concern for the water supply (comparable to that shown by the Megarian tyrant) but including the construction of a colossal temple to Olympian Zeus (completed at the time of Hadrian). That and more conjectural buildings on the Acropolis were a direct anticipation of the 5th-century building program of imperial Athens. Unlike painted pottery, they could be commissioned only as a deliberate act by men with plentiful command of money and muscle.
remains of the Temple of Olympian ZeusRemains of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens, Greece.Brand X Pictures/Jupiterimages
The tyrant Hippias was expelled from Athens by the Spartans in 510. They no doubt hoped to replace him with a more compliant regime, true to their general policy, as described by Thucydides, of supporting oligarchies congenial to themselves. Oligarchy, or rule by the relatively wealthy few, however defined, and tyranny were in 510 the basic alternatives for a Greek state. The newly emancipated Athens of the last decade of the 6th century, however, reacted against its Spartan liberators and added a third member to the list of the political possibilities—democracy. Spartan disappointment at this turn of events expressed itself not merely in unsuccessful armed interventions intended to install a prominent Athenian, Isagoras, as tyrant (506) and even to reinstate Hippias (c. 504) but also in attempts to persuade the world, and possibly themselves, that their relations with the Peisistratids had actually been good (hence another source of distortion in the tradition about the tyrants, who on this account emerged as friends, not enemies, of Sparta). The reforms of Cleisthenes
In 508, after a short period of old-fashioned aristocratic party struggles, the Athenian state was comprehensively reformed by Cleisthenes, whom Herodotus calls “the man who introduced the tribes and the democracy,” in that order. The order is important. Cleisthenes’ basic reform was to reorganize the entire citizen body into 10 new tribes, each of which was to contain elements drawn from the whole of Attica. These tribes, organized initially on nothing more than residence and not on the old four Ionian tribes based purely on descent, would from then on determine whether or not a man was Athenian and so fix his eligibility for military service.
The tribes were also the key part of the mechanism for choosing the members of a new political and administrative Council of Five Hundred, whose function it was to prepare business for the Assembly. The Council, or Boule, insofar as it was drawn roughly equally from each tribe, could be said to involve all Attica for the first time in the political process: all 140 villages, or demes, were given a quota of councillors—as many as 22 supplied by one superdeme and as few as 1 or 2 by some tiny ones. An interesting case has been made for saying that this political aspect was secondary and that the Cleisthenic changes were in essence and intention a military reform. Herodotus, for example, remarks on the military effectiveness of the infant Cleisthenic state, which had to deal immediately and successfully with Boeotian and Euboean invasions. And there were arguably attempts, within the Cleisthenic system, to align demes from different trittyes" class="md-crosslink">trittyes (tribal thirds) but the same tribe along the arterial roads leading to the city, perhaps with a view to easy tribal mobilization in the city centre. It is right that the political aspects of Cleisthenes (who was in fact far from producing democracy in the full sense) can too easily be overemphasized at the expense of the military; but the better view is that the new system had advantages on more than one level simultaneously.
One military result of Cleisthenes’ changes is not in dispute: from 501 on, military command was vested in 10 stratēgoi, or commanders (the usual translation “generals” obscures the important point that they were expected to command by sea as well as by land). Normally, each of the 10 tribes supplied one of these generals. They were always directly elected. Direct election for the stratēgia remained untouched by the tendency in subsequent decades to move in the general direction of appointment by lot. (Appointment by lot was more democratic than direct election because the outcome was less likely to be the result of manipulation, pressure, or a tendency to “deferential voting.”)