The feelings with which the memory of the tyrants was regarded in the latter part of the fifth century B.C. when Herodotus wrote his history are shown by a speech which he puts in the mouth of a Corinthian named Sosicles. The Spartans at some time between 510 B.C. and 490 B.C. conceived a project of reinstating at Athens the tyrant Hippias whom they had helped to dethrone, and requested their allies to send ambassadors to discuss the matter. The envoys of all the states disliked the proposal: it was Sosicles who expressed the feelings of all. "Surely" he said "the heaven shall be set below the earth, and the earth raised above the heaven, and men shall have their habitation in the sea and the fishes live on dry land, if ye, O Lacedæmonians, are preparing to destroy equal governments and to bring the cities of Greece under the rule of tyrannies, which of all things in the world are the wickedest and bloodiest. If indeed ye think it good for cities to be ruled by tyrants, ye should first set a tyrant over yourselves, and then seek to do the like for your neighbours: for if ye had experienced, as we have, what a tyrant is, ye would bring before us sounder opinions on the subject than those that ye have now declared[143]." He enforced his opinions by telling a large part of the story of Cypselus and Periander: and the effect of his words was such that the envoys at the congress declared their agreement with them and the Spartans had to abandon all thought of the restoration of the Athenian tyranny.
There can be no doubt that in the age of the tyrants the Greek communities were city states, or communities in which a walled city is of supreme importance and the rural districts are of comparatively little moment. In the case of Athens, the story of Pisistratus affords conclusive evidence: for in it we can observe three times over that, so long as his influence or authority extended only to the rural districts, he was but an aspirant to sovereignty: but, as soon as he was master of the city, he was established as tyrant. And in the other Greek communities tyrannies were upheld by body guards of foreign mercenaries: and this could hardly have taken place if there had not been in each community a single fortified city of such importance that a body guard by occupying it could dominate the whole country.
Between the tyrants of the Greek cities and the tyrants of the Italian cities of the middle ages there is a close resemblance: but the tyrants, both Greek and Italian, differ in one most important particular from all monarchs who have ruled over empires, tribes or nations. In an empire, a tribe or a nation the power of a monarch always has some visible utility: in an empire he holds the whole structure together: in a tribe or nation he repels foreign attack or leads his subjects to assail their neighbours: and above all, if his tribe or nation is successful and annexes new territory, he is supremely useful in amalgamating the people of the new territory with his old subjects. To a tyrant all these kinds of usefulness were impossible: the community that he ruled was too small to need holding together: it was too well protected by its mountain bulwarks and city walls to fear much hurt from hostile invasion: it could not hope to conquer neighbours whose defences were as strong as its own: and it did not acquire new subjects. There was, as we have seen, one momentous service which the tyrants could and did perform for their cities, and that was to put down the oligarchies and to ensure that they did not rise again: but, when once this task was performed, there was little else that they could do, and their power became a mere political survival, or an institution which exists not because it is useful but because it has existed and has not yet been removed.
III. The Democracies and the Later Oligarchies.
By the year 500 B.C. the tyrannies had disappeared from Greece proper from Asia Minor and from the Ægean sea: and from about that time democracies and oligarchies—the rule of the many poor and the rule of the few rich—succeeded one another alternately in most of the cities till the battle of Chæroneia in 338 B.C. put an end to the independence of the Greeks. My examples both of democracy and of oligarchy will all be taken from the history of Athens: for the march of events at Athens has been illuminated for us by Thucydides, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Aristotle, Demosthenes and other great writers and orators, while of the other Greek cities we have no knowledge beyond what can be derived from a few fragmentary notices. At Athens the period which we are considering was most unequally divided between democracy and oligarchy: the government was oligarchic only for four months in 411 B.C. and for eight months in 404 B.C.; throughout the rest of the time, a duration of nearly two centuries, it was steadily democratic.
My sketch of democracy and oligarchy as exemplified in Athenian history will be divided into five parts: (1) Moderate popular government 508 B.C.-480 B.C. (2) The changes between 480 B.C. and 432 B.C. (3) Democracy during the Peloponnesian war 432 B.C.-404 B.C. (4) Democracy after the Peloponnesian war 404 B.C.-338 B.C. (5) Oligarchies in 411 B.C. and in 404 B.C.
1. Moderate popular government under the Cleisthenean constitution 508 B.C.-480 B.C.
After the expulsion of Hippias a contest for power arose between Isagoras and Cleisthenes. Isagoras was a friend of the expelled tyrant: Cleisthenes, finding that he was getting worsted, made an alliance with the poorer classes and within three years after the exile of Hippias he was victorious. Cleisthenes, like Solon, devised a new system of government: and his system, like Solon's, was popular but moderate, and formed an instance of what Aristotle called Polity. He desired to grant the rights of citizenship to certain classes which did not possess them: and to this end he deprived the four old Ionic tribes of all political significance: for, as a tribe contained three φρατρίαι or brotherhoods, and each φρατρία—at least theoretically—contained thirty kindreds, each tribe was a close corporation consisting of a fourth part of the families of the Athenian citizens and would resist the intrusion of new members[144]. He divided the people, for political purposes, into ten tribes constructed on a new principle and defined not as containing certain families but as dwelling in certain demes or villages: and he enrolled in these tribes, and thereby in the list of citizens, a large number of men who resided in Attica, but were not of pure Attic descent[145]. It may be that each of the old tribes had formed a rallying point for one of those factions which had produced the dissensions between localities and classes in the time before Pisistratus: for Cleisthenes took care in his new division of the citizens that the demes which formed a tribe should not lie all in one district but some of them should be urban or suburban, some situated in the inland parts, and others along the shore[146].
The whole body of Athenian citizens, greatly enlarged by the inclusion of the new citizens, formed the ἐκκλησία, or general assembly in the constitution of Cleisthenes. The importance of the meetings of the assembly in the time before Marathon (490 B.C.) is proved by a passage in Herodotus in which he attributes the military successes of the Athenians in their wars with the Bœotians and Chalcidæans between 500 B.C. and 490 B.C. to their newly acquired right of free and equal speech[147]: for the right of free speech could not have produced such effects unless it were used in a general assembly.
The other parts of the Cleisthenean constitution have to do with the organisation of the army and of the council, with a strange and novel process known as ostracism, and with local government within the demes.