A. And straight political reforms
1. Solon also may have anticipated a later system used to dilute faction: 10 candidates from each tribe, 3 archons chosen from them by lot
2. Everybody definitely in the assembly
3. A shadowy council (boule) of 400, 100 from each tribe, maybe to decide what to vote on in the assembly like the Spartan gerusia
4. The heliaea, mass appeals court, verdict determined by vote
B. One final innovation: A written constitution on wooded axones, everyone swears to obey it for ten years and Solon gets the hell out of town: Croesus, Atlantis.
1 It lasted for five years, then the anarchia
1 Faction, brief division of power between farmers, nobles, and artisans
2 Then geographic division: the Plain, horse country, and consequently the Aristocracy and those dependent upon them,
3 The Coast, the trading and manufacturing establishment under "Boss" Megacles
2 And then: H. Ross or Colin Pisistratus
1 This is going to scare you. Pisistratus was the hero of the Gulf War. Mind you, it was the Saronic gulf, and the place he captured was Nisaea (and the Megareans took it back after he left!), c. 570
2 NOW...then he set out to found a new, third party out of the people dissatisfied with the current political division...(the Hill)
3 And THEN one day he came out and announced that he was in danger of assassination by his rivals...and the Athenians BOUGHT IT!
A. Mind you, he had two sets of wounds, his war wounds...
B. And the ones he'd inflicted on himself before he showed up in the Agora (full of his people) bleeding
C. They vote him a bodyguard who beat up anyone who disagrees with him and (ta dah!) instant tyrant: 561-0
4 Solon showed up in full combat gear, but nobody felt brave enough to take on Pesistratus's people in defense of their freedom that day... Solon died in 560-59.
5 Party strife, on the other hand, worked, and Pisistratus was exiled from 556-5. (Her. 1.59-64)
6 Then Pisistratus married "Boss" Megacles' daughter
A. One of them was quite the showman: Phye in the chariot
B. But Pisistratus would not give him an (inheriting) grandson... 2nd exile
7 No more Mr. nice tyrant... And money CAN buy some things
A. Went up to Macedonia for 10 years and opened some mines near Mt. Pangaeus (you'll be hearing more about those mines)
B. Hired mercenaries, had the support of Thessalian cavalry and still had his people back in Athens
C. Came back down via Eretria on Euboea, and defeated the constitutionalist citizens at Pallene in 540.
8 This time he's here to stay...
A. And Pisistratus soon made sure of that with a ban on assault weapons--Gun control, he who controls the guns, controls (Aris. Ath. Pol. 15.4)
B. And he seems to have kept his own force of Scythian archers as an anti-terrorism unit
C. And the children of his opponents as hostages
3 The Alcmaeonid family and others had beaten it, as Her. 6.29-41 reports
1 With (thanks to the Thracians) Militiades the Philiad went North, apparently having much the same plans there that Pisistratus did in Macedonia (559- 6)
A. Wall across the Chersonese
B. War with Lampsacus
2 And Pisistratus having the chance Solon forebore to buy popularity with other people's property when he redistributed the abandoned estates to his supporters.
4 What exactly is a (B3) "Constitutional Tyranny?" Preserving the image, changing the reality (remember this when you study Rome, folks).
1 Pisistratus left the old offices, but put his own people into them, Th. 6.54 mentioning his son Hippias, as archon.
2 Collected land tax, 1/10th at first, later 1/20th.
3 The ability to lower the land tax may have come from the new overseas connections and grain therefrom, or the increasing revenues generated by olive cultivation.
A. Good argument for this comes from Pisistratus's recapture of Sigeum from the Mytileneans
B. What with Militiades in the Thracian Troad (559-6) Athens now had a clear path to the Black Sea.
4 Neighboring powers knew that Pisistratus had his hands full staying in power, and foreign relations stayed tranquil.
5 More popularity purchases:
A. "Purification" of Delos and the Delian festival-- keeping the gods and their worshipers happy. Picked the wrong shrine to endow, though.
B. Cultural endowment:
1. Restoration of the text of Homer (maybe); probably a text prepared, bogus verses anecdote
2. Canonical reading order and paid Rhapsodes to recite all of Homer at the Panathenaia (best chance the common people had ever had to hear him)
3. Establishment of the Greater Dionysia and temenos of Dionysus
a) Goat song and dances, at first ritual, then elaborated, and ...
b) More myth in the pots
C. Jobs bills/buying off more gods
1. Hekatombedon temple of Athena
2. Temple of Athena Polias in marble
3. Huge temple of Olympian Zeus (always popular with tyrants!) never completed by the Athenians
D. Public works, classic: The enneakrounos fountain house: every time you get a drink of water, you think about Pisistratus.
6 Bad as is the "spin" that I keep putting on these activities, people still in Athens were feeling the better for them, and Pisistratus died in his bed c. 528-7
5 The problem with one-man rule, as Tom Paine (Common Sense) put it, is that you're never quite sure of what you get when the next guy gets the job...
1 Pisistratus kept the tyranny within the family, and his son Hippias succeeded him, helped by his brother Hipparchus.
XXX. End as of 10/9/95
A. Gesture towards the Alchmaeonidae, non-Pisistratids on the archon list, but... How much real power did they give out?
B. Hipparchus, for example, barred one Harmodius's sister from so much as carrying a basket in the Panathenaia... He'd almost live to regret that
C. Her. 6.104 reports how they ambushed and murdered Cimon, son of Stesagoras, despite Cimon's powerful family's effort (Olympic games story) to come to terms with the tyranny.
1 Money was still there, and consequently Athens' reputation as a center for art and culture got some continue reinforcement
A. Simonides, probably the best of the non-epic Greek poets (hymn to the tyrannicides vs. epitaph for Hippias's daughter Archedice)
B. Onomacritus, Anacreon (not yet in heaven)
1 Fall of the Pisistratid tyranny
1 Harmodius and Aristogeiton: Th. 6.53-9, also an excellent look at Th's historical method.
2 Hippias got progressively more grim
A. The reigns began to chafe, and the Athenians began to write songs in praise of the tyrannicid
B. Good songs, too--we've got a bunch of them that were preserved for centuries (Athenaeus 15.693f.)
C. The family silver mines in the north had recently been loss due to a (Persian) invasion in the region
3 And then he had to pay for a mistake his father had made, since Delphi was jealous of what had been done for Delos
A. The Alcmaeonids had been putting their money to good work once a coup of their own had failed at Leipsydron.
B. The old shrine had burned in 548/7, and all Greece had contributed to rebuild it
C. The Alcmaeonids got the contract and added a face of marble instead of the volcanic tufa/porous called for.
D. Damndest thing...Whenever the Spartans went to Delphi, they got the same answer: First free Athens! (Her. 5.52-65, 91-93; 6.123
E. Finally, King Cleomenes marched in and did in 510, although Hippias was allowed to escape to Persia, whence we shall hear from him again.
2 The beasts that would not die: Isagoras of the Coast vs. Cleisthenes of the Plain
1 Isagoras had the resurgent nobility and the supporters of the Pisistratids behind him, archon eponymous in 508.
2 Cleisthenes had the people of the coast and the threat of civil war behind him.
A. The nobility had lost its income under Pisistratus
B. Hippias had discredited the tyranny
C. And again, the lower classes had prospered, prosperity equaling wealth.
D. Clisthenes himself was a blue-blood, related to the tyrants of Sicyon, who had had a great deal of trouble with factional strife (Her. 5.70)
3 Isagoras appealed to the Spartans, who were already wondering if they'd made a mistake in expelling Hippias
A. After all, they believed in repressing the masses!
B. Accordingly, Cleomenes marched his troops back into Athens, overthrew Cleisthenes' government, and were all set to hand government over to Isagoras while the Spartans occupied the Acropolis
C. Cleomenes, note, had had a difficult accession to the Spartan throne, and he kept trying to compensate.
4 The problem was that people prefer to settle their own political problems (Somalia). National settlement was enough to make people fight for Stalin!
A. Cleomenes was surrounded for three days and forced to evacuate the Acropolis under terms (Her. 70- 74)
B. Cleomenes went so far as to recall Hippias from Persia, but for some reason Corinth and the other cities of the Peloponnesian League didn't like the idea of Spartan intervention in local politics (Her. 5.91-92)
C. For that matter, Corinth also wanted the pressure kept on Aegina, although Cleomenes was more accurate in foreseeing that Athens would end up being far more dangerous.
3 The old associations and geography had destroyed Solon's constitution. Cleisthenes set out to neutralize them in his reforms. This gets complicated...
1 Cleisthenes divided Attica into the regions of the Coast (his supporters!), the City (astu)(also his) and the interior (everyone else).
2 Now the oldest and smallest units of Attica were the villages (demes), which had survived their incorporation into the later geographic units
A. Between 100-200 of these
B. Very important to one's identity and sense of community.
1. People identified themselves by their patronymic (son of) and by their deme
2. Say "neighborhood" and you're doing reasonably well--the Philadelphia community associations and
3. Your own theory about the "stomping grounds," the largest region in which one feels at home.
4. Local demarch keeps the births and deaths register in which you stay as long as you're a living Athenian citizen.
3 Cleisthenes then organized the individual demes into thirty districts called trittyes named after its largest deme
4 These he put together in ten groups of three, one from each region, and called them the new tribes
A. Each tribe under a phylarch
B. Identity fostered by tribe-based military service
C. Interests of the tribes, then, transcend the old Ionian tribal and geographic divisions. Her. 5.66- 70 is a lot of fun here, since Herodotus is either missing the political nitty-gritty or jazzing it up. Note the great background he provides, though.
5 Having set up the system, Clisthenes modified Solon's constitution to use it.
A. The Areopagus had lost a lot of prestige and members when the Pisistratids and their boys had been thrown out.
B. Solon's council of 400 replaced or abolished in favor of a council of 500, 50 from each tribe, demes getting their allottment of representatives in proportion
C. May have been elected at first, afterwards selected by lot, which completely eliminates politicking (at the risk of getting a load of morons).
XXXI. End as of 10/11/95