And so it was that the Athenians found themselves suddenly a great power. Not just in one field, but in everything they set their minds to, they gave vivid proof of what equality and freedom of speech might achieve. As the subjects of a tyrant, what had they accomplished? Nothing exceptional, to be sure. With the tyrant gone, however, they had suddenly become the best fighters in the world. Held down like slaves, they had shirked and slacked; once they had won their freedom, not a citizen but he could feel that he was labouring for himself.51
It appeared that democracy might indeed be made to work.
A boast that the Athenians now joyously proclaimed to all the world. Returning to their city, they commissioned, in the ecstasy of their deliverance, an immense victory memorial—a chariot led by four horses fashioned completely out of bronze—and placed it directly beyond the gates to the Acropolis. There, raised on what had previously been the supreme showcase for aristocratic megalomania, the intimidating sculpture gleamed, the first thing that anyone entering the citadel would see, a monument raised not to any individual but to “the sons of the Athenians”52—to the people as a whole. Elsewhere, too, all across Athens, the renewed din of chiseling bore ample witness to the democracy’s enthusiasm for a facelift. Masons who had previously been laboring on the Pisistratids’ gargantuan temple could now be found at work on the sloping hill west of the Acropolis, the Pnyx, hewing from its rock an immense new meeting place for the Assembly, capable of seating up to five thousand at a time: a first and fitting monument to government by the people. Meanwhile, stretching away northward beyond the Pnyx and the Acropolis, in the great square raised to himself by Pisistratus, other workmen were systematically excising all traces of the tyranny. The half-completed temple of Zeus was left to stand as a monument to the tyrants’ folly, but the massive public space that Pisistratus had cleared in the heart of the city could not so easily be abandoned—not least because the citizens of the new democracy needed such a meeting place. “Agora,” they began to call it—the word for an area that all Greek cities had, a space where people might freely gather. The previous Athenian agora, to the northeast of the Acropolis, found its venerable public buildings supplanted, while the new one, of a scale and beauty altogether more worthy of the dignity of the people, was duly enshrined as the symbolic heart of the democracy.53
A point rammed home by the installation, right in its center, of a hefty bronze of the two tyrannicides. Their swords drawn, their faces stern, their bodies heroically if improbably nude, Harmodius and Aristogiton were portrayed as the joint saviors of Athens and the founders of her freedom. Considering that there were no other public portraits to be seen in the whole of Athens, the dominant position of these statues in the Agora was startling enough. What made it even more jaw-dropping, of course, was the fact that Harmodius and Aristogiton, far from having sacrificed themselves for liberty, had in reality cut down Hipparchus in a squalid lovers’ tiff. Indeed, if anyone deserved to be hailed as the city’s liberator, it was probably the King of Sparta—but the Athenians did not care to dwell on that. Hence the value to them of the tyrannicides. Like every other revolutionary state in history, Cleisthenes’ regime had an urgent need of heroes. Harmodius and Aristogiton, gratifyingly sanguinary, even more gratifyingly dead, were duly spun as democracy’s first martyrs.
The hype also served a more profound purpose. Cleisthenes understood his countrymen well; he knew that the Athenian people, revolutionaries though they had rather startlingly proved themselves to be, remained, in their souls, traditionalists still. Far from glorying in the novel character of the democracy, they craved reassurance that it was rooted in their past. Cleisthenes, ever subtle, had therefore been sure to adorn even his most daring experiments in the fustian of tradition. The tribes, for instance, had all been given the names of antique heroes, as though, like the Athenians themselves, they had sprung not from Cleisthenes’ fertile brain but directly from the soil. Even the democracy itself, so its founders implied, far from being something new, was in fact the primordial birthright of all the people of Attica, having originally been bequeathed to them back in the days of legend by the celebrated hero Theseus, slayer of the minotaur. Seen in such a light, what were the two tyrannicides themselves but monster killers, selfless patriots who had died in order that Athenian democracy might be restored? Smoke and mirrors all, of course—and hardly paying to Cleisthenes and his associates anything remotely like their due. Yet it is perhaps the clinching proof of their greatness that even Cleisthenes himself, scion of a family rarely noted for its modesty, should have recognized how essential it was to veil the full scale of his achievement behind such fantastical shadows. In founding democracy, he had invented his city’s future; but he had also, just as crucially, fabricated its past.
No statue of Cleisthenes in the Agora, then. Nor any place for him in his countrymen’s affections as their democracy’s founding father. Indeed, no sooner was he dead than the Athenians, indulging themselves in an extraordinary bout of amnesia, started to forget that they had passed through a revolution at all.*12 So natural did their new form of government already appear to them, so deeply rooted in the Attic soil, that a true understanding of its origins, just as Cleisthenes had calculated it would, began to fade. It was a bittersweet paradox: in the false-memory syndrome that buried Cleisthenes in obscurity was the ultimate proof of his stunning success. Not merely to have redeemed his country from civil war, but to have set it upon enduring foundations—only Darius, of Cleisthenes’ contemporaries, could compare. To be sure, between the Persian, monarch of all the world, and the Athenian, friend of the people, there might have appeared few correspondences; and yet in truth, in the scale of their achievements, and in what they betokened for the future, the two men were indeed well matched. Both had come to power amid bloodshed and given their countries peace; both had tamed the ambitions of a turbulent aristocracy; both, in doing so, had crafted a radical new future for their people and yet opted to disguise their originality behind the lumber of the past. Both, most portentously of all, had created something restless, and dangerous, and new.
Nor, for all that Athens, set upon the remote margins of the world as she was, stood shrouded in a natural obscurity, was Darius quite as oblivious to her now as he had previously been. Reports of her revolution had arrived in Persepolis. In 507 BC, while the Athenians were nervously awaiting the Spartan onslaught, and noting, with alarm, that Hippias had taken refuge on the southern side of the Hellespont, in territory held by Persia, they had sent an embassy to Sardis. There sat Artaphernes, brother of the King of Kings, ruthless and shrewd. When the Athenian ambassadors had arrived at his court and begged him for an alliance against the Spartans, Artaphernes had graciously granted their request. Naturally, however, he had set a condition of his own: the usual gift of earth and water. The Athenian ambassadors, shrugging their shoulders, had accepted his terms. On their return to Athens, when they reported the news of the submission they had made to Artaphernes, “they were severely censured”54—which no doubt enabled the democracy to feel good about itself. The Athenians, however, did not repudiate the alliance with Persia—or their own submission. Better safe than sorry. Even after the great victories of 506 BC, who knew when Cleomenes might be back? An insurance policy against the Spartans was no bad thing—even if it had cost a symbolic humiliation. And what was a gift of earth and water? A gesture—nothing more.