After years of varying fortune Pisistratus finally (540 or 539 B. C.) established himself as Tyrant of Athens. But tyranny at Athens was never more than an episode. The inbred spirit of freedom must be reckoned with. Pisistratus respected popular rights, and after the accession of his sons the suspicion of a tendency to introduce such measures as were acquiesced in, for example, at Corinth, brought death to the one and subsequent banishment to the other. But the result of the tyranny of Pisistratus was beneficent. Under him and his sons the city began to take on both externally and intellectually more of the characteristics which are in mind when we think of Athens. Architect, sculptor, and painter began to contribute enriching details to the Acropolis, including the first Propylæa. Engineers skilfully brought water from near and far into the old Market-place, and in front of the town spring of Callirrhoë Pisistratus built the spacious “Nine Spouts”—the Enneakrounos—where women filled their water-jars and stayed to gossip. The newer market-place, to the north of the Areopagus, was developed. A great Olympieum was begun on the site of the present columns, which date from Hadrian’s time. Gymnasium life became important and the Academy was made ready as if in anticipation of its great future. Doubtless within this lovely grove many a youth of the period might have served as a model for Aristophanes’s fifth-century picture of palæstra life in the good old times:—
“But you will go enter as Academe sprinter and under the olives contend
With your chaplet of reed, in a contest of speed with some excellent rival and friend:
All fragrant with yew and leisure time too, and the leaf which the white poplars fling
When the plane whispers love to the elm in the grove in the beautiful season of spring.”[[5]]
A distinctive part of Pisistratus’s policy was the encouragement of country life and of agriculture. All over the Attic plain the olive orchards were cultivated, to become an important source of revenue to the Athenian state and immeasurably to enhance the charm of its environment. Herodotus recounts that a tall, handsome woman named Phye, from the hill country, had impersonated Athena come down in mortal guise and, riding in a chariot with Pisistratus, had lent divine sanction to his original coup d’état. The Attic demesmen might still more easily accept this new measure as a command transmitted from Athena who had herself first created the olive tree and taught its culture on the Acropolis:—
“A heaven-sent grey-gleaming crown for her Athens,
Her city of light.”
Aristotle, in his “Constitution of Athens,” lays great stress on the effort of Pisistratus to develop the prosperity of the farmers. He tells how Pisistratus, walking in the country and seeing one digging among the rocks, asked what sort of a crop grew there, and the man, unaware that it was the Tyrant, replied: “Such a crop of evils and pain that it were right that Pisistratus should have his tithe of them.” Pisistratus, pleased both with his industry and his free speech, relieved the farmer of his burdens. And so, Aristotle continues, he was not troubled during his reign but could secure peace and quiet and “the word was often on the lips of many that the tyranny of Pisistratus was a regular life under Kronos,” or Golden Age.
Pisistratus did much toward securing for Athens the intellectual hegemony of Greece. Whatever the Panathenæa, inherited from Theseus (or even from Erichthonius), may have been previously, the Greater Panathenaic festival was now solemnized every four years with more magnificence and became at Athens the necessary and dignified offset to the quadrennial games at Olympia and Delphi. Games, sacrifices, and amusements of varied character were added from time to time. Horse, chariot, torch, and foot races were included. Visitors came from abroad. But neither local nor intercantonal athletics gave the keynote. Rhapsodists recited Homer, and flute, cithara, and song were heard. Everything tended to focus itself upon the worship of Athena, who was the Athenian consciousness glorified and made objective.