THE ATHENIAN PEOPLE
Attica.—The Athenians boasted of having always lived in the same country; their ancestors, according to their story, originated from the soil itself. The mountaineers who conquered the south land passed by the country without invading it; Attica was hardly a temptation to them.
Attica is composed of a mass of rocks which in the form of a triangle advances into the sea. These rocks, renowned for their blocks of marble and for the honey of their bees,[66] are bare and sterile. Between them and the sea are left three small plains with meagre soil, meanly watered (the streams are dry in summer) and incapable of supporting a numerous population.
Athens.—In the largest of these plains, a league from the sea, rises a massive isolated rock: Athens was built at its foot. The old city, called the Acropolis, occupied the summit of the rock.
The inhabitants of Attica commenced, not by forming a single state, but by founding scattered villages, each of which had its own king and its own government. Later all these villages united under one king,[67] the king of Athens, and established a single city. This does not mean that all the people came to dwell in one town. They continued to have their own villages and to cultivate their lands; but all adored one and the same protecting goddess, Athena, divinity of Athens, and all obeyed the same king.
Athenian Revolutions.—Later still the kings were suppressed. In their place Athens had nine chiefs (the archons) who changed every year. This whole history is little known to us for no writing of the time is preserved. They used to say that for centuries the Athenians had lived in discord; the nobles (Eupatrids) who were proprietors of the soil oppressed the peasants on their estates; creditors held their debtors as slaves. To reëstablish order the Athenians commissioned Solon, a sage, to draft a code of laws for them (594).
Solon made three reforms:
1. He lessened the value of the money, which allowed the debtors to release themselves more easily.
2. He made the peasants proprietors of the land that they cultivated. From this time there were in Attica more small proprietors than in any other part of Greece.
3. He grouped all the citizens into four classes according to their incomes. Each had to pay taxes and to render military service according to his wealth, the poor being exempt from taxation and military service.
After Solon the Athenians were subject to Pisistratus, one of their powerful and clever citizens; but in 510 the dissensions revived.
Reforms of Cleisthenes.—Cleisthenes, leader of one of the parties, used the occasion to make a thoroughgoing revolution.
There were many strangers in Athens, especially seamen and traders who lived in Piræus near the harbor. Cleisthenes gave them the rights of citizenship and made them equal[68] to the older inhabitants. From this time there were two populations side by side—the people of Attica and those of Piræus. A difference of physical features was apparent for three centuries afterward: the people of Attica resembled the rest of the Greeks; those in Piræus resembled Asiatics. The Athenian people thus augmented was a new people, the most active in Greece.