Certainly, rivalries among the elite remained quite as carnivorous and unforgiving as they had been prior to the establishment of the democracy. Even the towering figure of Miltiades had been speedily dragged down to his ruin. In 489 BC, barely a year after saving his city from annihilation, he had suffered a wound to his thigh while leading an expedition against a city of collaborators in the Aegean and had been obliged to return to Athens, his reputation in sudden tatters. The Alcmaeonids, nostrils twitching as ever, had sniffed blood. Unleashing the talents of an ambitious young politician named Xanthippus, to whom they had already married Cleisthenes’ niece, they had brought a prosecution against Miltiades, accusing him, with typical effrontery, of “deceiving the Athenian people.” Carried in before a baying Assembly, Miltiades had duly been convicted, and would have been hauled out of his stretcher, dragged through the “Hangman’s Gate” and flung down a pit had not the jurors, reluctant to deal with the victor of Marathon as they had previously treated the Great King’s ambassadors, voted instead for a crippling fine. Not so crippling, however, as the gangrene that had begun rotting the fallen hero’s leg, and which would, within a few weeks of the sentence, finish him off for good. His young son Cimon, somehow scraping together sufficient cash to pay off the fine, had duly inherited the leadership of the Philaid clan, together with a much-depleted fortune, and—it went without saying—an ongoing feud with the Alcmaeonids.
Yet, if the Athenian people, fearful of any situation “in which one man is able to exercise a wholly disproportionate power over his fellows,”27 had been content to see the great Miltiades humbled, that hardly spelled enthusiasm for his rivals. Who, precisely, had been the stooges in the prosecution brought by Xanthippus: the voters in the Assembly or the Alcmaeonids? The answer would not be long in coming. Two years after the death of Miltiades, citizens began flocking into the Agora, where a large voting pen had been erected especially for the day, with officials carefully scrutinizing all those who passed through it to ensure that no man voted twice. By the ten entrance-ways, one for each tribe, lay piles of broken pottery. Each Athenian, as he bent to pick up a shard, knew that he was laying claim to a feared and fearsome right. Once, in the time before the democracy, exile had been a fate inflicted by armed menaces at the whim of faction leaders, ruinous and brutal in its effects; now, for the first time, it was to be imposed as a measured sentence of the sovereign people. Every citizen, registering his vote on the back of a piece of pottery, was obliged to choose a prominent politician’s name. At the end of the day, all the shards—“ostraka,” as the Greeks called them—were to be sorted into piles and counted. The citizen with the largest number of nominations would then have ten days to leave Attica. He would not, as exiles had once done, suffer the loss of his property or his civic rights—but nor, for ten years, would he be permitted to return home. He was to remain, as the Athenians put it, “ostracised.”
This, a deadly weapon against the ambitions of any over-mighty family, had remained untested in the democracy’s arsenal ever since Cleisthenes had first provided for it, twenty years before.28 That the Athenians had voted to unleash it in the aftermath of Miltiades’ downfall suggests how resolved they were not to become the patsies of feuding clans. A people who had seen off the Great King certainly no longer felt obliged to live in the shadow of turbulent aristocrats. First to be cleared from the deck was Hipparchus, the notorious pro-Pisistratid, who, as archon in the previous decade, had been widely suspected of collaborating with Hippias and Artaphernes. The following year, 486 BC, it was the turn, not surprisingly, of an Alcmaeonid to get the push. Two years later, Xanthippus himself, reaping the due reward of his rise to prominence, was likewise dispatched. Philaids, Pisistratids, Alcmaeonids: all, in the years following Marathon, had effectively been decapitated. If the establishment of democracy had been a velvet revolution, then ostracism was a guillotine that cut off heads but spilt no blood.
And naturally, as in all revolutions, the elimination of an elite of power brokers left the field clear for more agile, more adaptable, more opportunistic rivals to take their place. The Alcmaeonids were not the only citizens to have felt themselves diminished by the blaze of the victor of Marathon; nor was it only grandees who hankered after a place in the sun of the Assembly’s favor. One man in particular, who had found the glory won by Miltiades a peculiar agony, suffering sleepless nights as a consequence, to the extent of being put right off his drink, was already moving adroitly to take advantage of the cull. Themistocles, who certainly did not lack for enemies himself, was aware that by continuing to pursue his political ambitions he was risking his own ruin. But even though, from the first ostracism, he had been a popular candidate for exile, with mounds of ostraka cast against him every year, he possessed one crucial advantage. The abuse that might be scrawled angrily against the names of other candidates for exile—“traitor,” perhaps, or “Datis lover,” or even, roughly sketched on to the occasional shard, the figure of a bowman with a Median cap—could hardly be leveled against Themistocles. Unlike most of those actually condemned to ostracism, he had always been consistent in his opposition to the King of Kings. The great harbor complex of Piraeus, begun during his archonship, and now, almost a decade later, the largest and best-fortified port in Greece, stood as bristling evidence of that. Indeed, as Themistocles had now begun arguing openly, all that was needed to complete the transformation of Athens into a naval power of the top rank was a fleet.
A tempting prospect for the poorer classes, perhaps—but hardly for the landowners and farmers who had so recently triumphed at Marathon. Themistocles was pressing for some two hundred ships to be built: the manpower required to propel such an immense navy would leave few citizens to fight on land, as was traditional, with shield and spear. Was the hoplite class really expected to vote itself into liquidation? And who, perhaps even more pressingly, was to fund Themistocles’ extravagant naval program? Warships did not come cheap: a fleet of them was perhaps the most expensive status symbol to which any city could aspire. Listening to Themistocles’ proposals, the rich could have a shrewd idea as to who were likeliest to be stung for the bill. No wonder, then, with the elimination of those traditional spokesmen for reaction, the heads of the great families, that the upper classes had to cast around desperately for an alternative champion. They did not have far to look. Aristeides, the general who had stood alongside Themistocles in the weakened center at Marathon, had begun to emerge by the mid-480s BC as his bitterest and most effective opponent. Even in their characters the two men appeared formed for rivalry. While Themistocles was labeled a chancer, a man of superlative duplicity and cunning, Aristeides was hyped by his followers as the ultimate model of upright, homespun virtue. Whereas Themistocles was notorious for pocketing bribes at any opportunity, his rival had a reputation for poverty so stern and honest that when, after Marathon, the Athenian army had set off on its desperate foot slog to Phalerum, it was Aristeides who had been left behind on the battlefield, entrusted with the loot. “The Just,” his admirers liked to call him: a moniker which the great man, without the faintest embarrassment, had made his own.29