This is a survey of ancient Greek history from the Bronze Age to the death of Socrates in 399 BCE. Along with studying the most important events and personalities, we will consider broader issues such as political and cultural values and methods of historical interpretation.
The Reforms of Kleisthenes
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From the course by Wesleyan University
The Ancient Greeks
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From the lesson
Democracy. The Persian Wars
Module 4’s sessions will begin by focusing on the crucial decade at the end of the 6th century, when the Athenians instituted full democracy. In fact the development of democracy is one of the principal reasons to study Greek history. Athens was also the adopted home of Herodotus, who was the first author in the West to characterize his writing as history. Herodotus chose to recount the first great clash of cultures in the West, the conflict between Greece and Persia, and his story goes far beyond the war and its battles. He was deeply concerned with how societies define themselves. The breadth of his interests, his insight and his good humor all contribute to the appeal of his work. We will also observe how Athens, under the leadership of the brilliant general Themistocles, began to transform itself into a formidable naval power.
Meet the Instructors
Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, PhDProfessor
Classical Studies
We talked last time about the Athenian revolution and we talked also very briefly
about the men whom the people were going to put into power and that is one
Cleisthenes. Kleisthenes is a member of the Achaemenid
clan, and because of the, the impiety, the sacrilege committed by Megacles a century
before, his clan is still called the accursed, but as we've also seen they're
very, very powerful. There's a story about the Athenian
revolution before we move to the reforms of Cleisthenes that is worth telling,
because it shows how controversial this family was.
And Herodotus reports that the Achaemenids had furnished a great new temple at
Delphi, there's Delphi again, and had bribed the priestess there.
So that anytime a Spartan came to ask for an oracle the priestess would say, free
Athens. And so we saw how this worked with
Cleomenes, whether this is true or not is up to debate.
But it does give some indication of the importance of the continuing importance,
and as I say, controversial nature of the status of this plan.
After the departure of the Spartan, and of the Spartans under Cleomenes, and after
the Setting aside, he wasn't killed but he was set aside, Isagoras, the ruler of
Athens. The people chose Cleisthenes and he
undertook a wholesale, reconstruction of the Athenian constitutuion.
This is a little bit complicated to follow.
If you look at the map that I have said into the website at the link that's in the
website, you can see how this works much more vividly and visually, but for now let
me explain. He divided Attika, this big, one thousand
square mile territory. And to three major geographical units.
The city, the coast and inland. This is not the same as the old
[inaudible] regions that we talked about, U=uh, the factional regions, although
there must have been some overlap anyhow. Each one of these regions then was divided
into 10 artificial units called trittys, so there were 30 trittys in all.
Each trittys, in turn, was made up of one or more demes.
In some ways this is the heart of this system because the demes were the
pre-existing neighborhoods. A trittyes in the city might consist of
just one deme, one particularly densely populated little block or neighborhood.
Back in the hinterlands, a trittys might have had two or three rural demes that had
to be brought together. The reason for this was, that there were
ten new tribes created. Each one named after a eponymous hero, and
each one consisting of three trittyes, one from each region.
You start to get the idea? What Cleisthenes is doing is dealing a
death blow, or at least severe injury to the continuing local power of the old
clans. What's happening is that Athens is being
redefined on a geographical basis, it's no longer those property class's that Solan
had set up. But now what you have are these new
tribes, and the principle was that each of them should represent a cross-section of
the entire Athenian population, from the coast, from coast-to-coast one might say,
from the coast all the way to the inland, and that each of them should be roughly
equal in size. In the life of the individual it was the
deme that was most important. Deme identity is what made you a citizen.
When you became 18 you were proposed for membership in a deme by your father or an
adult male relative. There was some sort of scrutiny of your
appropriateness to be there, and when you were inducted into the deem, then you
became a citizen. And in fact your deem name became part of
your official name, so that you might be Socrates, son of Sophraniscus from the
deem Alapici. The deems were official corporations, they
had meetings, and, as I say, their principal function was to determine who
got to belong to the politeia, to the citizen body, and who not.
Likewise the tribes were official identifications, with officers, a
treasury, perhaps a central meeting place. It's even been suggested that in the
developed theater of Dionysus in Athens, the big sort of amphitheater that we'll
look at in a little while, the audience was seated by tribes.
Maybe so, maybe not, but for our purposes today, what the tribes did was to comprise
the new council. I've mentioned already, that there was
this sort of shadowy council of four hundred that's [unknown] may or may not
have identified. There was also the very old council called
the Areopagus made up of former archons, and that does continue to exist, but now
the civic heart really becomes the new Boule, it comprises five hundred citizens,
you can do the math. There 50 selected by lot every year from
each tribe his lifetime. So the Boule served as a kind of
continuing, so to speak, education center, political education center for the
Athenian citizenry. The Boule framed legislation, that would
then be debated and voted on for ratification by the assembly.
The official Athenian decrees that we find on stone, often begin with, it seemed good
to the people, to the demos, to the assembly.
And then follows the text of whatever law it was.
It was the Boule that served as how shall we say, it's the probolutic function is
what it's called. When they frame the legislation and give
it to the assembley. It's also the Boule that would send out
ambassadors and receive envoys from abroad although the final power to declare war or
truce stayed with the assembly. And it was the Boule that conducted the
annual investigation or scrutiny of the magistrates after their term in office.
So, this was a very, very important new invention.
Still a group of 500 is a little bit too big to conduct efficient business and so
Kleisthenes further divided the civic year into ten units.
These are called Prytaneis, the beginning of the civic year, lots were drawn and in
order of the lots, one tribe would serve for a tenth of the year as the so called
Prytanizing tribe, which is like the executive committee, and they would help,
i suppose hammer out the wording. For the legislation that would then pre,
be presented to the entire council and then eventually to the assembly and the
like. And to make this even more complicated, in
case it wasn't complicated enough for you yet.
Within these Prytany's every day, one citizen from the Prytanizing tribe was
chosen to be overseer. For a period of 24 hours and you could do
this only once. So what you have is a mechanism that draws
eventually all of the citizens into some part of governing their own state.
It is a massive undertaking. It must have required after all some kind
of surveying, some kind of census, some sort of preliminary identification of who
got to be a citizen, because incidentally, your deme identification was passed from
father to son to son, etc. No matter where you moved.
I mean, if you moved out of. Your original deem say out in the
hinterlands into the city, or decided to move from the city into the hinterlands.
You still remained a member of the original deem in which you had been
registered. And then, you could, if you wanted go to
the assembly. Which included, as I say here, all
citizens and they were guaranteed freedom of speech.
But one of the things you can sort of intuit from this is that one of the ways
you got political power in Athens was by speaking publicly.
And well, because you had to persuade, the ability to persuade large groups of your
fellow citizens was a crucial skill. The magistrates continued in office, there
were now 9 Archons, they persist. But Kleisthene's also instituted a new
board, And these were the 10 Generals. This becomes really, really important
because the Archons served for just one year then underwent a kind of examination
by the Boule, and then passed into the Areopagus.
Generals, however, were elected one from each tribe, and could be reelected without
limit. This was, for example, the source of
Pericles great power. We will talk about him shortly.
Pericles was never an archon, but he was general over and over and over.
So that the strategia as it's called became in some ways the most important
military and political office in the stay. There is also a new system or set of
popular courts and again these could have citizen juries to several hundred to hear
cases. Another form we'll talk much more about
this later on, another form of civic involvement on the part of each citizen.
And then finally, it was Cleisthenes who introduced the institution called
ostracism. When we talk about ostracism today, at
least in the US. It has something to do with a sort of
social shunning, you can talk about somebody being ostracized, that nobody
really wants to talk to them. But in Athens, ostracism was an official
process. Early in the year, the assembly was asked,
if it wanted to have an ostracism? If it voted in the affirmative.
Later on in the year there was a vote. You had to have a quorum of 6000, which
means getting a lot of citizens together at one place at one time.
The citizens were than supplied with ostraca, which just means a bit of busted
pot. A pot shard, on which was written the name
of one individual. These were deposited in collection vases
then counted, and the citizen who got the most votes had to leave Athens for 10
years. There was no appeal to this.
This was clearly meant as a measure to deter tyranny.
If somebody was getting too popular, was getting a little bit too full of himself,
well, you could have an ostracism. And archeologists have found dumps of
ostrica Which have the same name written in the same handwriting because most of
the citizens were iliterate. This is according to Aristotle one of the
most democratic parts of Kleisthens' Reforms.
Italy so to speak holstered for quite some time, they didn't use it right in a way.
But eventually as we'll see, the great families could use this democratic
mechanism as weapon, as weapon, as a weapon against their political opponents.
As I said, this system must have taken an enormous amount of logistical preparation
and we have virtually no evidence as to how it was conducted.
It's traditional date is 5087, and we see here, and this brings us back to a topic
that we were discussing last time, what I think is a real changing, it has become
less and less fashion to talk about pivotal moments in history, we think
instead. Of long, long processes almost geological
in nature. But I think that with the Athenian
revolution and with the Kleisthenes reforms, we are seeing a genuine massive
change, in the nature of Athenian society, in the nature of politics.
Kleisthenes laid the ground work for the democracy in Athens, but in someways has
been the model for all subsequent democracies in the west and it was a
democracy that lasted in this polis for at least 200 years with only minor
alterations. And now we'll see what happens next when
this democracy goes into action.
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