Decorously, therefore, they concealed the nakedness of their supremacy behind the veil of Solon’s constitution. Candidates from families other than the Pisistratids continued to be permitted to run for the archonship. Most, of course, were the tyrants’ placemen—most, but by no means all. Two, in particular, would have leapt out at anybody scanning a list of the city’s archons. One of these, startlingly, was a Miltiades: not the adventurer who had been a contemporary of Pisistratus, but his nephew, recently emerged as head of the Philaids, and would-be tyrant of the Chersonese himself. Just above him was an even bigger jaw-dropper: an Alcmaeonid, no less, one Cleisthenes, restored both to Athens and to her highest office by the favor of the tyrants. Who could doubt, seeing the former exile on the archon list, the legitimacy of the regime that had put him there? Who doubt, when even the most implacable enemy of the tyranny appeared content to adorn it, that the brothers were there to stay?
Yet it was possible to interpret the return of Cleisthenes in a very different light. Could the Alcmaeonids, those inveterate back-stabbers, really have buried the hatchet? To rely upon their good faith was certainly a gamble. Sure enough, soon after Cleisthenes had served his term of office, he overplayed his hand and was forced back into exile.34 This could be viewed as a victory for the Pisistratids—but it was a peculiarly perilous one. The source of their legitimacy, after all, was their ability to keep peace and public order. Descend to faction-fighting and their grip on power would start to slip. While they could hardly permit popular unrest, neither, awkwardly, could they risk indulging in too much of the repression that might stem it. Seen in such a light, even the temple of Zeus might appear less a monument to their self-confidence than a colossal bluff.
And in truth, such illusions were the hallmark of the regime. Look one way, and Athens might indeed appear a monarchy. Look another and something very different. The citizen inspecting the archon list, if he turned eastward, would see, along the margin of the open space, the glint of money changing hands, and hear the clamor of business—for the square, that imperious exercise in Pisistratid self-promotion, was already being colonized by commerce. Merchants had grown fat on the tyranny. Silver weighed heavy on counting tables all over the city, coins standardized, it seems likely, by the Pisistratids themselves, stamped on one side with Athena and on the other with her sacred owl—a currency so pure that already it had come to rank among the strongest of any city’s. But if it had served to make the rich more of a force to be reckoned with than ever, it had also raised the profile of those on whom big business depended, whether the potters of the Ceramicus or the farmers who supplied the olive presses. Hippias and Hipparchus, like their father, courted them all. Every class in Athens was wooed and flattered somehow. Just as the archons were encouraged to pretend that the constitution was something more than a glorified sham, so the people were still cast as citizens who were sovereign, earth-born, free. Potters and farmers, told that often enough, might even end up believing it. Such a delusion naturally served the tyrants’ own purposes well. Actors rarely appear more authentic than when convinced of the reality of their parts.
Of the many memorials raised by the tyranny to itself, then, perhaps the most fitting was not the temple of Zeus, nor any other grand projet, but rather an addiction among the Athenians to the wearing of masks, the mouthing of scripts and the playing of roles. Later generations, looking back to the mysterious birth of tragedy, would have no hesitation in attributing to the tyrants’ original patronage a prestigious new festival, the City Dionysia, which had as its centerpiece a contest between rival tragedians—nor in imagining what the motive for such sponsorship might have been. After all, “only allow ourselves to praise and honour make-believe,” as Solon was said to have warned, “and the next thing will be to find it creeping into the very business of state.”35 Which was, of course, for the Pisistratids, precisely the appeal.
Yet they too, lost in a hall of mirrors of their own making, appear sometimes to have longed for a guiding hand. How best to find one in a city in which the boundaries between fantasy and fact, propaganda and truth, had grown so blurred was naturally a challenge. Fearful of overreliance on any human agency, the two brothers opted instead to put their faith in the supernatural. Hippias, it was said, “had a deeper understanding of oracles than any other man living,”36 and together with his brother sponsored a vast archive of prophecies, which they hoarded lovingly on the Acropolis. When Hipparchus discovered that the archivist, an intimate of his by the name of Onomacritus, had been doctoring them, the tyrant was so upset that he banished his friend on the spot. Intelligence, after all, was only ever as good as its source. Bearing this in mind, the two brothers placed a particular reliance upon their own dreams—and to such effect that they ruled their city without challenge for thirteen years.
Then, one blazing night in the summer of 514 BC, on the eve of the Great Panathenaea, Hipparchus had a vision that he failed to understand. A young and very beautiful man spoke to him from beside his bed, warning him in the urgent and cryptic manner of dreams that crimes must always be paid for. Hipparchus, waking with a jolt, would surely have devoted himself to identifying the offense he might have committed and making amends—but it was the morning of the Great Panathenaea and he did not have the time. Instead, leaving his home, he hurried across his father’s square, heading for the Ceramicus, where his brother was organizing the great procession that would soon be departing for the Acropolis. As he passed a temple on the edge of the square, Hipparchus saw two men he recognized pushing their way toward him. Perhaps then, too late, he made sudden sense of his dream. For the two men were coming to murder him. One, Harmodius, was the handsomest man in Athens, “in the full splendour of his youth,”37 while the other, Aristogiton, was his lover—and Hipparchus, who had an aesthete’s eye for beauty, had attempted to split the couple for his own predatory ends, and thereby mortally offended them both. Dreading the power of the tyrant, and knowing that they had no other recourse, the two lovers had been biding their time, waiting until a festival such as the Panathenaea, at which everyone wore swords, when they would have their chance. Now, with Hipparchus before them, and with his bodyguards distracted by the crowds, they cut him down.
That was the limit of their conspiracy. Harmodius himself was killed on the spot; Aristogiton, although tortured for a few days, revealed nothing of any broader plot. Yet could Hippias afford to believe that the two assassins had acted on their own? Hipparchus, after all, had been murdered because he had abused his power; and the whisper on the streets was that he had been the victim, not of a crime of passion, but of a heroic blow struck in the cause of freedom. Hippias began to grow paranoid. With the ebbing of his confidence, the shadow play which he and his family had long orchestrated appeared increasingly a sham. The balance that they had always struck with such delicacy—between the true nature of their regime and the sets which had served to adorn it, between menace and a gracious magnanimity—was fatally upset. Despairing, the bereaved and panicky Hippias began to rely increasingly upon naked terror. Executions, previously carried out in back rooms, were soon washing the city in blood. Repression bred conspiracy; conspiracy led to further repression. The pretense that Athens was anything other than a police state began to seem a savage joke. Hippias, formerly “a man who was always easily approachable,”38 now hunkered himself away among his Scythians and his other foreign mercenaries, as though he were some alien despot, as though barely Athenian at all.