The Political Institutions of the Ancient Greeks

by Basil Edward Hammond

The military force under Pisistratus and his son had consisted of foreign mercenaries: Cleisthenes established an army of citizens. Each tribe furnished a brigade serving under the general whom the tribe had elected: at Marathon in 490 B.C. the right wing was formed by a body of troops under the Polemarch and then from right to left the ten tribal brigades were marshalled in order each under its own general[148].

The number of the council, which Solon had fixed at four hundred, was raised by Cleisthenes to five hundred, fifty councillors being taken from each tribe[149]. In the time of the Peloponnesian war, (as will be shown further on,) the council of five hundred was a committee of citizens entrusted with the duty of controlling the proceedings of the general assembly: it considered resolutions and projects of law before they were submitted to the assembled people: the fifty councillors of each tribe enjoyed for a tenth part of the year the dignity of πρυτάνεις or presiding officers, both in the council and in the general assembly, and the name πρυτανεία was applied both to their right of presidency and to the thirty-five or thirty-six days for which they possessed it: and, as the assembly met often and had much business to attend to, such a committee was obviously necessary. The records of the age of Cleisthenes give no details about the doings of the assembly and the council: but the activity of the assembly, as we have already seen, began in that age, and it is natural to suppose that some of the later functions and organisation of the council may be referred back to this time. The opinion is confirmed by a piece of evidence from Plutarch who states incidentally that in 490 B.C. the tribe Æantis was the presiding tribe in the assembly which resolved that the Athenians should march out to resist the invader Darius[150]. It is probable that under the Cleisthenean constitution the assembly met once in each prytany.

The process of ostracism was devised to guard the state against any future demagogue who might, like Pisistratus, aspire to make himself a tyrant, and perhaps also against the recurrence of such a contest for the chief power as had arisen between Cleisthenes and Isagoras. The public assembly could, without naming any person, order that on a fixed date a vote should be taken in which each citizen might write on a potsherd the name of any man who ought in his opinion to be banished. In case the name of any citizen was found to be written on six thousand of the potsherds, he went into exile for a term of years but did not suffer any further hurt[151].

Local divisions and local governors had existed in Attica even before the time of Cleisthenes: the divisions were called naucrariæ and their governors naucrari. We know nothing about them except that each naucraria contributed two horsemen to the army and a ship to the navy, and that the naucrari assessed the taxation needed for these purposes and had something to do in the expenditure of it. Cleisthenes established his demes as local divisions in lieu of the naucrariæ, in each deme he set up a demarchus or president of the deme, and the demarchi took over the functions which the naucrari had hitherto discharged[152]. Beyond what I have stated we know nothing from direct testimony about the demes in the days of Cleisthenes: but there can be no doubt that even in his time the inhabitants of every deme used to meet in assembly and the assembly regulated the affairs of the deme. There had been a time when Attica was the home not of one state but of many independent commonwealths each having its own government[153] and its own divinities: and the people in the days of Cleisthenes had not forgotten the fact, for their descendants eighty years later in the time of Pericles still cherished its memory[154]. Moreover the Athenians even so late as the time of Pericles delighted in country life for its own enjoyments[155], and even then a majority of the citizens of Athens lived not in the city but in the country[156]: and if the attractions of life in the city did not draw men to desert their demes and live in Athens in the time of Pericles it is certain that nothing that the city could offer in the time of Cleisthenes would entice them from rural to urban life. From all these considerations it is clear that the rural demes in the days of Cleisthenes were well filled with a resident population: the resident inhabitants of the rural demes were citizens of Athens, and, as citizens, took part in settling great matters of state: and it cannot be supposed that they did not take part in regulating the comparatively trivial affairs of their own localities. In the time of Demosthenes about a century and a half after Cleisthenes the assemblies of the demes were fully organised bodies and had plenty of business to employ them[157].

One more change made by Cleisthenes is worth a passing notice. He ordered the archons to be directly elected, and abolished all drawing of lots in their appointment. Twenty years later, in 487 B.C., the Athenians made the appointment more a matter of chance than it had ever been: they selected five hundred, and out of this large number the nine archons were taken by drawing lots[158].

I may now give a brief summary of the political condition of Attica in the days of Cleisthenes. In Attica at that time, as in all parts of ancient Greece at all times, the population consisted partly of free men (i.e. the citizens) and their families, and partly of slaves. In matters of government the decision of great matters rested with the assembly of all the free men: but, as most of the free men lived habitually in the country and the assembly met only about once in a month, the management of current business was left to the Archons for the year and the permanent council of the Areopagus composed of Archons and ex-Archons. The government therefore was a mixture of different elements: for dealing with ordinary matters the governors were a small number of the ablest men, while for dealing with matters of special importance the rulers were the whole body of free men. In such a government there was no likelihood that either the rich citizens could oppress the poor or the poor could oppress the rich: it was in short what Aristotle afterwards called a Polity, or the rule of all the citizens conducted for the good of the whole community. There is every reason to believe that no government with precisely the same qualities existed elsewhere in Greece: for, if there had been one, Aristotle, who admired such governments beyond all others, would have mentioned it in his Politics.

2. The changes between 480 B.C. and 432 B.C.

The invasion of Greece by the Persians under Xerxes and the subsequent maritime supremacy of Athens produced great changes in the character of the Athenian government. When the Persians had passed over the mountains near Thermopylæ, Attica lay at their mercy, and the ten generals proclaimed that every Athenian must save himself as best he could. The council of the Areopagus however contrived to provide a sum of money as an instalment of pay for men who were willing to serve on shipboard; a hundred and eighty ships were manned, and the men who served, probably about thirty-six thousand in number, received a sum of eight drachmas apiece. The Athenian fleet, which was thus provided, formed more than half of the whole Greek force that won the marvellous battle of Salamis: and the Areopagus was allowed by the Athenians in recognition of the service it had rendered to have the chief influence in the government of Athens for twenty years[159]. But the whole body of the citizens who risked their lives in winning the great battle had contributed more effectually to the result than the council that found the money. Moreover within a few years after the defeat of Xerxes the Greek cities in the islands of the Ægean sea requested Athens to be their defender against Persian attack: from being protector of the islands Athens soon became their suzerain, receiving from them contingents of ships or payments of tribute, and possessing a maritime supremacy and abundant revenue such as no Greek city had ever enjoyed: and all these brilliant achievements were due to the exertions of the poorer citizens who served as common sailors on board the galleys[160]. Athens, Piræus and Phalerum were fortified and joined together by the building of the long walls and were formed into a single city capable of containing a very large population. The result of these events was a rapid progress towards democracy: the council of the Areopagus was deprived in 462 B.C. of most of its powers[161], the rules which had hitherto excluded citizens of the poorer classes from holding the archonship were repealed or disregarded[162], pay was provided for the citizens whilst serving as judges or jurymen in the law courts[163], and in various ways, twenty thousand—probably a majority—of the citizens were in the employ of the state and received from it salaries or wages sufficient to maintain them[164].

3. Democracy during the Peloponnesian War 432 B.C.-404 B.C.

The changes which have been mentioned, together with others which have been passed over, produced the constitution under which the Athenians lived during their contest with Sparta. In the description of it we must notice (1) the general assembly and the council of five hundred, (2) the executive officers, (3) the judicature, (4) instances illustrative of the working of the constitution.