Cylon, his brother, and their descendants were condemned to perpetual banishment. But Megacles and the entire clan of the Alcmaeonids were tried and found guilty of sacrilege. They too were all exiled in perpetuity and even those who died between the date of the offense and the passing of the sentence were exhumed and their remains thrown out. The point was not so much to punish those convicted as to remove the threat of divine displeasure.
A curious shaman-like figure, Epimedes, who was a Cretan seer, philosopher, and poet, was brought in to purify the city itself. He was said to have fallen asleep for fifty-seven years in a cave sacred to Zeus and died at an extreme old age. Tattoos were found on his corpse and his skin was preserved in the ephors’ court at Sparta, for whom he had prophesied on military matters.
The seer accepted the Athenian commission and conducted the necessary rituals. He only charged for his services an olive branch and an alliance of friendship between the now cleansed city and Knossos, the capital of his homeland.
—
In the seventh century we at last enter an era of something looking like history. In the Mycenaean world, as we have seen, most states were monarchies, but by the time the “Dark Age” was over and light again suffused the scene, hereditary rulers like Theseus had mostly vanished.
In the place of kings, there was almost continuous civic strife between dominant aristocracies and impoverished peasants. Cylon’s story is evidence of something unsettled in the Athenian polity, and much the same was the case in other Greek city-states, or poleis. There was a shift from animal husbandry to arable farming and migration from the country to the city. Between 1000 and 800 the Hellenic population seems to have remained more or less constant, but then, alongside a general economic and social revival, came rapid population growth, a major destabilizing factor. To have too many citizens was a problem that could only be partially alleviated by sending out citizen colonies. It inevitably contributed to unrest at home over land ownership and food production.
The nobility hijacked the Greek word for good, agathos, which came to mean of high birth. In Athens, these Eupatridae were connected with each other by intermarriage and ties of kinship. They forged international links, often traveling around Greece and the Mediterranean and giving each other generous hospitality and gifts. They were fiercely proud of their genealogies and fiercely competitive with one another. They looked back with regret to the obsolete heroes of old.
Unsurprisingly, men of this cast of mind strongly objected to new money and resisted upwards social mobility on the part of wealthy parvenus. The worst thing was to marry rich girls with no background. A poet, Theognis, a Greek from Megara who flourished in the middle of the sixth century, noted sourly: “Wealth has mixed up the race.”
The lords and ladies of Homer’s epics were the model for later aristocratic lifestyles. Theognis put the conservative case against social change in tones that have been repeated through the ages by defenders of privilege:
This city is still a city, but the people are not the same.
Once they knew nothing of justice nor laws,
But wore old goatskins
And lived outside the city like deer.
And now they are “noble”…while those
Who used to be noble are worthless.
The Eupatridae were satisfied with the way things were. The peasantry took a different view. For them the status quo had become unacceptable. Aristotle summed up their situation:
The poor were enslaved to the rich—themselves and their children and their wives. The poor were called dependents and “sixth-parters,” since it was for the payment of a sixth of what they produced that they worked the fields of the rich. All the land was in the hands of a few, and if the poor failed to pay their rents both they and their children were liable to seizure. All loans were made on the security of the person.
Many of the common people were in debt. They pledged their persons and could be seized by their creditors. Some of them became slaves at home, and others were sold into foreign countries.
Just as important as the problem of indebtedness, perhaps even more important, was the rising anger of ordinary Athenians at their subordinate relationship to the rich, their dependence on them as clients. They simply wanted to be free of their masters.
—
During the seventh and sixth centuries two ways were found of resolving this conflict between the classes. The first was to install one-man rule—in other words, a tyranny. The second was to invite an experienced politician to recommend radical constitutional reform—in other words to hand over the problem to a wise, all-knowing lawgiver.
A tyrant, or turannos, was a despot who depended on the backing of the people. Aristotle writes:
The tyrant is set up from among the people and the mob against the notables, so that the people may suffer no wrong from them. This is clear from the facts of history.
Charismatic and ruthless, he was usually a dissident nobleman, who seized power by coup d’état. Tyrannies tended to last for two or three generations, but seldom for longer. Of the main Greek states only Sparta and the island of Aegina appear to have escaped periods of tyranny. The word “tyrant” did not acquire a pejorative connotation before the fifth century. Many of these rulers were no worse than the aristocrats who had preceded them, and some were a distinct improvement. Above all, what they did was to quash the class war by the use of force.
The Cylon affair only exacerbated social and political tensions in Athens. It was clear that tyranny would not attract support, so a trusted lawgiver called Dracon was appointed in 622 or 621 to prepare a legal code and for the first time in the history of Athens to put it in writing. Perhaps it was meant to address, among other things, the fallout from the Alcmaeonid prosecutions. Little of the code survives, but it reflected the world of the blood feud and the rituals of purification. The legislator won a reputation for harshness. Apparently, the death penalty was applied to people convicted of idleness, and indeed for almost every offense. According to Demades, an Athenian orator and politician in the fourth century, Dracon “wrote his laws in blood, not ink.”
The criticism seems to be unfair, for the only laws of his to come down to us are sensible and humane rulings on manslaughter. Involuntary homicide was punished by exile, and relatives of the dead man were entitled to give the offender a pardon. If a person defended himself against “someone unjustly plundering him by force” (that is, a burglar) and killed him, “that man shall die without a penalty being enforced.”
Whatever the truth about Dracon’s work, a review of Athenian legislation did little to calm the atmosphere of political rancor.
—
Solon was born into a good family in about 638, although it had fallen on hard times. It claimed descent from Codrus, last of the semimythical kings of Athens who flourished towards the end of the second millennium.
Those were the distant days of the Dorian invasions of mainland Greece. The Athenians were determined to resist the newcomers. They boasted proudly that they were autochthonous. They had not come from anywhere and they were going nowhere.
The oracle at Delphi prognosticated that a Dorian attack on Attica would only succeed if its king was unharmed. So Codrus decided to give his life for his country. He disguised himself as a peasant and made his way to the Dorian encampment, where he provoked a quarrel with some soldiers and led them on to killing him. Once the Dorians realized what had happened, they piously withdrew from Attica and left the Athenians in peace.
Some time after Codrus’s death, the monarchy was abolished and replaced by three annually elected officials. The Basileus (or king) retained the old title, but was restricted to important religious duties. The Eponymous Archon (so-called because he gave his name to the year in which he held office) was, as we have seen, the civilian head of state and government; and the polemarch (or “war-ruler”) was the army’s commander-in-chief. These officials with executive powers were later supported by six others, making a total of nine Archons. Archons were appointed on the basis of birth and wealth. According to Aristotle, at first they held office for life, although this was apparently reduced later to ten years and by the seventh century to one year.