The Classical World (15 page)

So could his main opponent, the year’s leading magistrate, Isagoras. He promptly summoned the Spartans to intervene, whereupon Cleisthenes artfully withdrew from Attica. The Spartans invaded, and Isagoras gave them a list of a further 700 families who were duly exiled. This listing is a fascinating example of the detailed knowledge which one aristocratic clique might have about the others, its rivals. The aim was for the Spartan invaders to install Isagoras and his partisans as a narrow pro-Spartan oligarchy, but the existing Athenian council members (400 of them as prescribed by Solon) resisted vigorously. The Spartans and Isagoras resorted to occupying the Acropolis, whereupon the other Athenians, ‘agreeing with the council’ (though some dispute this translation of the Greek),
⁴
joined in and besieged them. Resistance had now caught on among the citizenry, and when the Spartan invaders surrendered there was no stopping the progress of Cleisthenes’ proposals, the origin of the incident. The outrage of the Spartan invasion made them seem all the more desirable. By the early spring Cleisthenes was back in Attica and the proposed reforms could be voted through and carried out. There was now a much finer alternative to tyranny than Sparta’s system. The word ‘democracy’ happens not to be attested in any surviving Greek text before the mid-460s, but it was a very simple one to have coined on the spot.

The Athenian version counted on a very strong willingness of all
citizens to participate. In 508 less than a fifth of the citizenry lived in Athens ‘city’: many of them had to walk in and lodge with friends if they were to serve and attend meetings. For one-tenth of the year a fraction of the council, the Athenians’ most visible ‘presiding’ body, would even be kept in the city on permanent alert. Yet a council of 500 continued to be manned yearly without difficulty. Assemblies, at least four a month, would meet in the city too, though they were expected to number more than 6,000 for important business. In due course, procedures to scrutinize all new council members both before and after holding office became established beside the ‘scrutiny’, still rather cursory, of magistrates. After
c.
460
BC
an Athenian who served for a year on the council would expect to hear the brief ‘vetting’ of 509 separate participants in public affairs. As a great modern historian of their democracy, M. H. Hansen, has observed, ‘to our way of thinking it must have been deadly boring; that the Athenians went through it year after year for centuries shows that their attitude to this sort of routine must have been quite different from ours. They evidently enjoyed participation in their political institutions as a value in itself.’
⁵

After nearly forty years of tyranny, and after centuries of aristocratic domination, this keenness was not surprising. Between 510 and 508 Athenians had feared above all a return to the noble faction-fighting which had brought them such bloodshed in the 560s and 550s. Now, there were to be no bureaucrats, no detested ‘ministries’, not even any specialized lawyers:
l’état, c’est nous
, all adult male Athenian citizens. To modern eyes, there were still conspicuous exclusions: ‘all citizens’ did not mean ‘all residents’. Non-Athenian residents (the
metoikoi
, or metics, meaning those living away from their home), inhuman objects of property (the many slaves) and the unreasoning second sex (women) were excluded without question or hesitation. These exclusions were universal in the political systems of Greek states. But what was new was that every male citizen was included equally. From now on, a male citizen might find himself on the council, appointed by lot to a minor magistracy or standing, thrillingly, in a mass meeting, waiting to vote or even (if brave) to speak on the fundamental topics of life, on whether or not to go to war, on who should pay what, on who should be honoured or excluded. On controversial questions, he
would raise his hand to vote and be counted. In Sparta, when choosing magistrates, the assembled Spartiates would merely be asked to shout in favour of each candidate, and the ‘authorities’ would decide for which one they had shouted loudest. Even Aristotle considered this a childish game show. Among the Athenians, each male citizen counted for one and no more than one, the simple porter or goatherd beside the smart aristocrat. By having to choose and to be seen to have chosen, people soon learn to think and to take up informed positions. The results were anything but mob-rule.

The danger, rather, was that a leader of a frustrated option might try to rush a proposal through the assembly a second time and refuse to accept defeat. Brilliantly, Cleisthenes proposed that once a year Athenians should vote whether they wanted to hold an ‘ostracism’. If so, with more than 6,000 people present, they could cast a bit of broken pottery (an
ostrakon
) inscribed with the name of any citizen-candidate they proposed, in the hope that he would attract the most potsherds and thus be sent off into exile, to cool off for the next ten years. He would leave knowing that a majority had been against him, thereby ruling out his hope of a counter-coup; when he returned he would be ‘yesterday’s man’. Ostracism was a purely political process in intention and execution: it did not derive from religious beliefs or some need to expel ‘pollution’ or a ‘scapegoat’. Political through and through, it became a crucial safety valve during the next seventy years or so of Athenian politics. It also presupposed that a high proportion of the Athenians could read or could at least find somebody to read for them. However, the ability to read, in many societies, does not require the separate skill of writing. Thus we hear stories of potsherds being written out in batches for voters to take up: our increasingly large volume of surviving
ostraka
do show that some of them were written by the same hand breaking up one and the same pot. This organization does not necessarily point to cheating or a manipulation of the ignorant. People who did not write could still read what they held. The surviving bits of pottery contain some wonderfully rude comments against individual rotters which appeal to personal prejudice and the scandal in the news-headlines of the time. Some of them even have witty drawings on them too. There is nothing similar, of course, in Persia, Egypt, Carthage or any monarchy.

With two minor interruptions, this democracy persisted among the Athenians and evolved for more than a hundred and eighty years. In our terms, it was remarkably direct. It was not at all a ‘representative democracy’ which elected local representatives either to ‘represent’ their constituents or their own careers and prejudices. Its whole concern was to limit power-blocs or over-assertive cliques, to achieve fragmentation, not representation. In many moderns’ opinion, use of the lot was the hallmark of Athenian democracy; in fact, Cleisthenes is not known to have extended random allotment in any new way. As a Greek practice, use of the lot had a long pre-democratic history anyway, not least as a way of allotting shared inheritances fairly between brothers. Nor were property qualifications abolished for the democracy’s senior magistrates: they were to be elected, but only from propertied candidates. So far as we know, there was to be no pay yet, either, for them or for council members. But what mattered was that they served only for a year and that they were not a ‘government’ with a ‘mandate’ of their own devising. Power lay with the assembly, and in that assembly each male citizen counted for one, and one only.

To our eyes, this democracy was more just than any previous constitution in the world. Nonetheless, the administration of justice was left unchanged: cases were still heard and tried by magistrates, with only a possibility of a secondary appeal on a few charges to a wider, popular body. Cleisthenes certainly did not base his proposals on judicial reform or new law courts. To modern outsiders, then, how ‘just’ is it all? Slaves continued to be widely used; women were politically excluded; immigrants were separately categorized and were not able to claim citizenship in virtue of a few years’ residence in Attica. The point, rather, is that throughout the ancient world, even the gift of equal votes to all male citizens, to peasants as well as noblemen, was almost unparalleled (it did exist, though, in Sparta) and the combination with it of a popular, rotating council and an assembly with almost total power to enact or reject proposals was unprecedented, as far as we know.

On present evidence, the Athenians were the first to take this democratic leap. No well-informed contemporary source implies that any other Greek city already had such a system. In south Italy, nonetheless, archaeologists have proposed the Greek city of Metapontum as a
forerunner. In
c.
550
BC
a large circular building was constructed here, with space for some 8,000 people. Surveys have suggested that the city’s territory was indeed divided into equal lots, perhaps of this approximate number. In due course, the houses along the city’s streets were built to a similar, repetitive style and size. Perhaps Metapontum had had ‘equal’ government of some sort before 510
BC
, an extended oligarchy maybe, but we do not know that the owners of its land were the entire citizenry nor that the circular building was used for political meetings, let alone for equal voting by every male, peasants included. It is not the proof of a democracy before Athens.

Unlike many Greek citizens, especially those overseas, Athenians had one great asset: they had lived for centuries in the same territory. Their local social groupings and local cults gave them an unusually strong infrastructure and a sense of community on which Cleisthenes capitalized. He did not attack private property or redistribute riches. Perhaps his particular ‘clan’ gained a degree of advantage from the detailed local arrangements of citizens into new tribes, but it was an advantage in a new and changed arena. Cleisthenes brought a new justice, an equal vote for every male citizen, and the blessings of a new freedom, political participation. Justice was also applied to the local units of community life, the many demes, who were duly influenced by the centre’s new system.

Alarmed, the Athenians’ non-democratic neighbours tried to invade and kill off the new democratic system, but the newly inspired citizenry beat them back on two fronts at once. Their victories were seen, rightly, as a triumph for a freedom which they all shared: freedom of speech.
⁶
There was no limit now, in principle, on who could serve in the new council or speak in the assembly. The ‘freedom’ at stake was not a freedom from state interference or a freedom from harassment by social superiors or unchecked magistrates. It was not a reserved area, merely protected by ‘civil rights’. Since Solon, in 594
BC
, their superiors’ licence to enslave ordinary Athenians had been abolished anyway. Instead, male Athenians now had the one right which really mattered, an individual vote on every major public issue. Their new freedom was a ‘freedom to…’, worth fighting for. From their battles in self-defence they returned with hundreds of prisoners for lucrative ransom and rich plots of land: 4,000 such plots were divided from
land taken from the cavalry-classes of hostile Euboea, once the champions of early Greek overseas ventures. These gains were hugely rich and probably given to the poorer Athenians, a further bonus of new democracy; the fetters of the prisoners were displayed for years on Athens’ Acropolis. Athenians who died in these first ‘democratic’ battles may even have been honoured with a new privilege, burial in a new public cemetery. But it had been a hard battle, and, in order to find allies in these years of crisis, the newly democratic Athenians even sent envoys out east to the Persian governor at Sardis. Better a distant Persian, they thought, than a Spartan-style oligarchy. When their ambassadors agreed to submit to the Persian king and offer the symbolic ‘earth and water’, the Athenians in their democratic assembly held them ‘greatly culpable’ and rejected them.
⁷
Fifteen years later, their new democratic freedom would be severely tested by those very Persian helpers whom they had sought.

The Persian Wars

When they had finished dining, they had begun the drinking and the Persian [Attaginus] said as follows to the Greek, a man from Orchomenus, who was sharing a couch with him. ‘Since you are my companion at table and we have shared in the same libations, I want to leave you with a memorial of what I think, so that you may have foreknowledge and be able to decide what is to your own advantage. You see these Persians dining here and the army which is camped up by the river: in a short while, out of all these people you will see only a few left alive.’ As the Persian said this, he shed copious tears… Then he said, ‘My friend, no man can turn aside what must come about from God… Nobody wants to heed even those who say what is trustworthy. Many of us Persians know this but we follow, bound by necessity. This is the most hateful anguish of all among men, to understand much and to prevail in nothing.’

Herodotus, 9.16, on the Persian–Theban drinking-party
before the battle of Plataea (479
BC
)

When the sixth century
BC
began, the Persians were living in a trivial kingdom south-east of modern Shiraz in Fars in Iran. It is most unlikely that any Greek, Egyptian, Jew or Levantine had ever heard of them. They had contacts with the more civilized court at Susa, seat of the Elamite kings on their western borders, but their own society was tribal, their riches still mainly in their flocks. At his accession, their king would drink sour milk and chew the leaves of the terebinth
tree. No Persian bothered to learn to read or write. Their values were much more straightforward: tell the truth, ride a horse and shoot arrows.

Between the 550s and 520s the Persians overran the entire Near East from Egypt to the river Oxus. They profited from discontent in several of the major neighbouring kingdoms, the total absence of a popular nationalist opposition and their own hardy style of warfare with bow and spear on foot and horseback. Susa, Sardis, Babylon and Memphis fell to invaders who had never even seen a city, let alone cities of such splendour. In 530 their great King Cyrus died in an aggressive war against a tribal army out east in central Asia beyond the river Oxus. The Greek historian Herodotus claimed to know at least seven Persian versions of Cyrus’ death, but the one which he chose to tell had none of the others’ solemnity. Cyrus’ opponent, he wrote, the tribal queen Tomyris, had taunted him for being ‘insatiable for blood’.
¹
When he attacked her army and was killed, she proved her point by filling a bag with blood, hunting for King Cyrus’ corpse and stuffing its head into the bag to give it more of the blood it had craved.