Together with relatives and entourage Hippias settled in the polis of Sigeum on the coast of Asia Minor near Troy. Its name means “place of silence.” This was probably an antiphrastic expression—namely, one that signifies the opposite of something’s true characteristics. The weather in the city’s neighborhood was said to be wild and stormy. The destination was a good choice, though, for Pisistratus had annexed the place in the 540s and installed an illegitimate son called Hegistratus as tyrant.
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In the centuries that followed the fall of the tyranny, the contribution that Pisistratus made to the development of Athens was undervalued. Tyrants fell out of fashion and it was in nobody’s interest to give him any credit. In fact, he governed well and greatly enhanced the image of Athens in the wider world. During his long reign he provided stability and calmed social discord.
Above all, he recognized the importance of winning the consent of those over whom he ruled. By sticking to Solon’s reforms, ordinary, hard-pressed citizens were encouraged to believe that they had a stake in their community.
Thucydides acknowledged that for a long time both father and sons displayed “high principles and intelligence in their policy.” Taxes were low, the appearance of the city greatly improved, religious sacrifices properly observed. He continued that Athens
was still governed by the laws which had existed previously, except that [Pisistratus and Hippias] took care to see that there was always one of their own family in office.
If one had to be ruled by a tyrant, Pisistratus was clearly the man to choose. And he laid the ground for the next adventure in the history of Athens. As Herodotus noted, “Athens, which had been great in the past, now became greater still after her deliverance from the tyrants.”
7
Inventing Democracy
A bright light shone on the Athenians, when Aristogeiton
And Harmodius killed Hipparchus;
The two of them made their native land equal in laws.
So reads the inscription on the marble base for a bronze statue group of the star-crossed lovers, which Cleisthenes the Alcmaeonid commissioned. It was written by that celebrated hired hand, Simonides, once in Hipparchus’s employ and perfectly happy then to hail the tyranny. There they stood, proud and righteously angry, as cast by Antenor, a fashionable sculptor of the time. These were the heroes who gave back to citizens their equal rights before the law—code for destroying the tyranny.
Popular songs have survived, which young bloods chorused over their wine at dinner parties.
Darling Harmodius, we know you are not dead.
They say you are in the Islands of the Blest
Where swift-footed Achilles lives.
This is a puzzle. The assassination of Hipparchus in 514 was a botched and rather squalid business, done in a panic and lacking a truly idealistic motive. The regime survived the blow for some years and did not fall to a domestic uprising. Quite the reverse, it was a Spartan king prodded by the exiled Alcmaeonids who gave the Athenians their freedom. But this was generosity of a kind that is very hard to forgive.
Hence the less-than-historical advancement of Harmodius and Aristogeiton to the status of national heroes. Their descendants were granted perpetual freedom from taxation and, it seems, other privileges regularly bestowed on outstanding citizens, such as the right to take meals at public expense in the town hall, exemption from some religious duties, and front-row seats in the theater.
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Cleisthenes and the Alcmaeonids had won. The tyranny was over and the family was back home where they ought to be. They and the other Eupatridae had every reason to believe that they could slip back into power as if Solon and the five decades of the tyranny had never taken place. However, it was not clear that the mass of the people, the demos, many of whom had followed the star of Pisistratus, would accept this reversion.
The situation was bound to unravel. The details are murky, but Cleisthenes expected a reward for all the expenditure and hard work he and his family had put in over so many years. He deserved to be the leading man in the polis, but now to his annoyance he found he had a competitor. This was Isagoras, a slippery nobleman who had spent the reigns of Pisistratus and Hippias comfortably and safely in Athens. He was in league with secret supporters of tyranny. In 508 he was elected Archon, but Cleisthenes responded by calling the poor and dispossessed out onto the streets.
In turn, the Archon summoned King Cleomenes back from Sparta, who marched into Attica with a small force, expelled seven hundred families opposed to the policies of Isagoras, and attempted to abolish the council, or bouleˉ, established by Solon. Things looked bad for Cleisthenes, who briefly left Attica.
However, the infuriated populace rose in arms and blockaded the Spartans and Isagoras in the Acropolis. The king entered the temple of Athena, but received a cold welcome from the priestess, who rose from her chair and said: “Spartan stranger, go back. Do not enter the holy place.” After three days, the hungry Cleomenes capitulated. He, his troops, and his protégé were allowed to leave under a truce. This inglorious affair was a blow to the king’s prestige, and he meditated revenge.
Cleisthenes decided that so long as the Athenians failed to settle their domestic quarrels, they would go on risking revolution and external attack. Decisive measures were urgently required.
What should these be? No account survives of his thought processes, but we can tell from the outcome the revolutionary nature of his analysis. He realized that time could not be turned back, that the aristocratic moment had passed, and that if the Alcmaeonids and their like were to survive, let alone thrive, only the most radical solution would do.
Acting from the most self-interested of motives, Cleisthenes invented democracy.
He devised a set of extraordinarily complicated and artificial constitutional arrangements. They ought not to have worked, but the Athenians accepted them and put them into effect. They were the template for the world’s first total democracy, which thrived for most of the next two centuries.
As Herodotus puts it, Cleisthenes “enlisted the people into his party of supporters.” He did more than that. He recognized that the ordinary citizen would no longer put up with a top-down system of government of any kind. Although it might seem to be selling out, the best chance of saving the Alcmaeonids from oblivion was to lead the charge for people power (the word democratia is formed from two others—the demos, signifying, as we have seen, the people, and kratos, or power). All being well, they could then continue to play a leading role in the affairs of a grateful polis.
We need to be clear about what Cleisthenes and his fellow-citizens meant by democracy. It was not the representative kind that characterizes modern societies. Athens and the other Greek city-states had very small populations by our standards and it was possible to assemble a majority, or at least a large fraction, of the citizenry in one meeting place, and debate and approve all legislation.
This was an unmediated and extreme version of the democratic idea, but there were some important exclusions. As already noted, only adult Athenian men were entitled to vote in the ecclesia. Women were barred from the political process. There were two other substantial groups that were also prohibited. The city attracted numerous foreigners who settled in Attica and made a good living as craftsmen and merchants; these were the resident aliens or metics. Also Athenians owned slaves—captives of war or purchases on the open market—who had no civic rights. In total, these people amounted to well over a half of the overall population.