In his book The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles and Ideology, published in 1991, Mogens Herman Hansen wrote:
Chapter 3
The Athenian Constitution down to 403 BC: A Historical Sketch
The sketch that follows anticipates many important concepts, such as democracy itself, citizenship, and the political geography … that will only receive their proper treatment later. But … the principles of this book demand a chronological account of the beginnings and first century of Athenian democracy before we embark on the systematic study of its fourth-century form … Some persistent controversies are also glossed over in this sketch in what may seem a somewhat bland manner; that is because they are of relatively minor importance for our purpose, for which it suffices to follow … the traditional account of Athenian democracy, without too many 'ifs' and 'buts'. …
The Archaic Age
Democracy was introduced into Athens by Kleisthenes in 507 BC; but in order to understand what he did we must go back more than a hundred years to an age when Athens was governed by magistrates (archai) picked by, and from, the Eupatridai (the 'well-born'), i.e. the leading clans. The most powerful magistrates were the nine archons, of whom the chief gave his name to the year. In the Athenians' own memory of the archon list — and perhaps it was accurate enough — that system went back to the archonship of one Kreon in 683. An important political assembly was the Board of Chairmen … but … our knowledge of Athens in the archaic age [is limited] …
We do know that the Athenians were divided into four tribes, that at the head of each was a 'king', and that each tribe was subdivided into three ridings ('third parts') and twelve naukrariai [subdivisions].
There is no evidence that Athens in that age had an assembly of the people … The laws remained unwritten, but were enshrined in the memories of the magistrates, who had to operate them so as to give judgement in lawsuits between citizens.
Economically also the Eupatridai were the ruling class. Most of them were substantial landowners, and besides their own produce they received annual contributions from a large and growing group of smallholders ([a smallholder was] obliged to make over a sixth of produce every year to the large landowner whose dependant he was: if he failed in that obligation he could be sold into slavery). There was a deepening gulf between rich and poor, perhaps mainly due to population growth: the number of Athenians may well have doubled between 750 and 600, and, unlike other Greek states, Athens did not get rid of its surplus population by the founding of settlements abroad (apoikiai). Amongst the smaller landowners, the rules of inheritance may have had the effect that the individual's plot became so small that its holder had to rely on help, or loans, from the big landowner in the neighbourhood; or that some sons had to leave their father's plot of land and cultivate marginal land or become tenants. Population growth, however, is only one out of many possible explanations of how poor Athenians became … eventually indebted to the aristocrats. What we know is only that in the end [they] could end up as a slave … The impoverished smallholders began finally to agitate for the abolition of debt enslavement and the liabilities of the [smallholder], and for a redistribution of the land. In the hundred years from about 630 to 530, those social and economic tensions produced a series of political crises, of which the most important resulted in [coups] …
[After the Archaic Age, up to 403 BC]
… In 621 Athens acquired its first written code of laws, as a result of which the Eupatridai no longer had a monopoly of knowledge of the law and the convenience of remembering the clauses it suited them to remember. …
… Meanwhile, the socio-economic problems of the state remained unresolved, and only in 594 did rich and poor unite to give the archon Solon plenary power to dictate a compromise. Solon was himself a Eupatrid … He began with a general amnesty, then abolished enslavement for debt and gave freedom to those so enslaved, even those who had been sold abroad … Next, he freed the [smallholders] from the sixth-parts and allowed them to hold their land free of obligations; but he set himself against a redistribution of the land, and for ever after the archon on entering office had to proclaim that he would uphold the existing distribution of property.
Besides his economic reforms Solon also reformed the administration of justice. According to later tradition he set up a people's court … manned by sworn jurors, and gave every party to any lawsuit the right to appeal to [it] against the award of the magistrates; two surviving laws prove, however, that the [people's court] was not only a court of appeal but could also hear new cases. Solon also expanded the right of legal accusation, hitherto confined to the injured person, by giving every citizen the right to start a prosecution either on behalf of the injured person or simply in the public interest.
In Solon's time Athenians were divided into three property classes: cavalry, owners of a yoke of oxen, and 'menials', the day labourers. The fourth, top class (men worth 500 'measures' of natural produce) may have been added by Solon. The [menials] were excluded from all state offices, and to the most important offices the electors (probably the People's Assembly) could chose only citizens from the top class or — as in the case of the nine archons — from the top two classes. Thus, election now depended on wealth instead of birth, and by that means Solon created the conditions for a shift in Athenian society from the rule of aristocrats to the rule of the wealthy.
However, of Solon's constitutional reforms the most important, according to the tradition, was his creation of a Council of Four Hundred, 100 from each of the four tribes … the Council had the task of preparing all matters to be decided by the Assembly, exactly as the later Council of Five Hundred had … There can be no doubt that the oligarchs in 411 claimed Solon's alleged Council as their paradigm, and thus it is impossible to tell for certain whether the whole thing was just a propaganda invention that got taken afterwards as history or whether it really did once exist.
Last but not least, Solon carried out a new codification of the laws, and for hundreds of years 'the laws of Solon' were the juridical foundation of Athenian society: they were not revised till 410-399, when they were recodified; and in that form they remained in force until the abolition of the democracy, Solon's law-code was, of course, not a comprehensive and systematic code in the modern sense, but a collection of laws, divided into sections not according to content but according to which magistrates were to administer them.
Moreover, like other codes, that of Solon most likely contained provisions only about what we would nowadays call private law, criminal law and the law of procedure; only in the revision after the restoration of democracy in 403 were there added to the code provisions about the powers of the organs of state and detailed regulations about administration. Hence the extreme difficulty of deciding whether particular constitutional reforms that were later attributed to Solon really do go back to the early sixth century.
Solon's reforms underwent the usual fate of all sensible compromises: neither side was satisfied. He tried to get the Athenians to maintain his laws unchanged for ten years, and defended himself in verse pamphlets (prose being as yet unknown for literary purposes), of which substantial parts have come down to us, the first surviving reflections of a European statesman. He went abroad voluntarily for the ten years during which he hoped his laws would be respected. … But the citizen body was soon split into three competing factions: the 'Men of the Plain' (i.e. the plain around Athens)…; the 'Men beyond the Mountains' … ; and the 'Men of the Coast’. All these leaders were, of course, themselves aristocrats, and now there happened at Athens, rather late, what had happened in many city-states in the previous hundred years: a leader of subsistence farmers got the upper hand over his fellow aristocrats and made himself tyrant.
In Athens, as elsewhere in Greece, changes in the constitution were probably a corollary of changes in the fighting-forces. In most states the core of the army had ceased to be the mounted aristocrats and was now the foot soldiers … the so-called hoplitai, mainly recruited from the farmers. Military power led naturally to political power, so it was usually a commander of hoplites who turned against his peers and, with the help of the farmers, set himself up as tyrant.
In 561 Peisistratos became tyrant in a coup. Formally, Solon's constitution remained unaltered: Peisistratos merely saw to it that his supporters were elected archons and kept a mercenary bodyguard about him always. He was tyrant, barring two periods of exile, from 561 to 527; his exiles were both due to the Men of the Coast allying themselves with the Men of the Plain to oust him, but for most of the time he succeeded in obtaining the collaboration of the Men of the Coast under Megakles and of many of the aristocrats. The fourth-century Athenians also believed that Peisistratos championed the poor and so solved the land problem. In any case he founded emigre communities in northern Asia Minor and the Hellespont, and after his death there was never a movement for land reform. Peisistratos was succeeded by his son Hippias (527-510), who met gradually increasing opposition from the aristocrats, and many of them were forced into exile. …
… No sooner was the tyrant [Hippias] driven out than a split developed between the newly returned aristocrats under Kleisthenes and those who had stayed behind, led by Isagoras who had been a supporter of Hippias until he joined the revolt. Isagoras was elected archon for 508/7, and Kleisthenes, finding that he had no hope of success with only his aristocratic faction to help him, 'took into his faction the ordinary people’.
Supported by the demos he [Kleisthenes] successfully opposed Isagoras, whose name, ironically, signifies 'freedom of speech' (isegoria), the very ideal advocated by Kleisthenes and his supporters. But Isagoras had a guest-friendship with King Kleomenes, and with the help of a Spartan army forced Kleisthenes and his followers into exile, whereupon the Athenian people rose in revolt. They booted the Spartans out, recalled Kleisthenes and condemned Isagoras to death in his absence.
In 507, only three years after the expulsion of the tyrants, the domination of the aristocrats, too, was abolished in favour of a new form of constitution, ‘democracy', which was actually arising in several Greek city-states at the time.
In order to break up the old social structure and create a new, homo geneous one, Kleisthenes instituted a new organ of state, the Council of Five Hundred, based on a new division of Attica [Attic Peninsula] into ten tribes, thirty ridings, and 139 demes [subdivisions], a new 'bouleutic' calendar based on the solar year, and new cult associations based on the ten tribes. … [The] new cult organizations never caught on, but the Council became one of the principal organs of state alongside the Assembly and the People's Court throughout the classical period, and the redistribution of Attica [the whole region with 139 subdivisions] was the basis of a political structure that lasted, with modifications, for more than 700 years. …
… Here it is [most] important to list a series of reforms whose purpose was to secure the new democracy from enemies inside and out. Kleisthenes saw to it that many non-Athenians and even freed slaves were inscribed in the new demes [subdivisions], thus becoming Athenian citizens and firm adherents of the new regime. The redivision of Attica was also probably undertaken at least in part with an eye to a New Model Army, for each of the ten tribes was to supply a hoplite regiment; and not long afterwards, in 501, the Board of Generals was first introduced, elected annually by the people and with ten members: they commanded the army … and were the most important board of magistrates all through the fifth century.
Finally, there was ostracism. Ostracism is the best-known of all Kleisthenes’ novelties. In the years 510-507 he had had personal experience of how the rivalries of political leaders could split the state: to obviate such stasis in the future he introduced a procedure by which a leader could be sent into banishment (but not penal exile, with no loss of status or property) for ten years. … The law of ostracism is correctly attributed to Kleisthenes, but it was twenty years before the Athenians actually used it… Banishment by ostracism was used some fifteen times during the fifth century … The procedure was never abolished, but was a dead letter in the fourth century. …
Ephialtes
[After Kleisthenes, after war with Persia, and after other short-lived less important Athenian leading figures.]
… By defeating the Persians and ostracizing the supporters of tyranny, and by creating the Delian League in 478 [an association of many Greek city-states under the leadership of Athens, formed to fight the Persian Empire] and consolidating the predominance of the Athenian fleet in the Aegean, the Athenians laid the groundwork for a further advance of democracy.
The transformation of Athens from a land power to a sea power led to a shift in the internal balance of power, because the land forces (the hoplites) were recruited from the middle class whereas the navy was manned by the poor (the thetes).
Furthermore, now that Athens had to lead and administer the [Delian League of Greek city states], the Assembly and Council and courts had far more and greater tasks to fulfil, so that the role of all three must have been significantly enlarged.
The result of these developments was the passing, on the motion of one Ephialtes, of a law transferring the political powers of the Areopagos [the old assembly, exact period of origin unknown, named after the hill overlooking the assembly place] to the democratic decision-making bodies.
The archaic Areopagos had had oversight of the laws, the magistrates, the politically active citizens, and the general conduct of all Athenians, and it could pronounce judgement, not excluding the death sentence, in political trials.
… But a group of democrats, led by Ephialtes and his henchmen, the young Perikles … were keen to remove altogether the island of aristocratic power in the midst of a democratizing state, and in 462 they succeeded in reducing the Areopagos to the single function of being the court for homicide … Over a generation [the Areopagos] had ceased to be an assembly of leading political figures and turned into a more random cross-section of the upper class …
Thus, in 462 the perfect chance presented itself to curtail the powers of the Areopagos in order to make it correspond to its changed composition; the powers that it lost were divided between the Assembly, the Council and the People's Court. …
Perikles
Ephialtes …was succeeded as 'leader of the people' by Perikles … For the next thirty-two years Perikles was the acknowledged but not uncontested leader of Athens … Year after year Perikles was elected general, and as speaker and proposer he so dominated the Assembly that Thucydides the historian was moved to coin the famous apophthegm that in those years Athens was 'in name a democracy but in fact under the rule of the first man'; but it was through, and as champion of, democracy that Perikles exercised his power. Under him democratic development was pushed further, especially on two fronts: citizens began to be paid for political activity, and the criteria for citizenship were made more severe. …
… The new pressure of business, especially on the Council and courts, involved an increase in the number of meetings, but many citizens could only afford to participate if they received compensation for working-time lost. Perikles introduced daily pay, first for the jurors in the People's Court and then for councillors and the rest of the magistrates.
The second reform, the tightening of conditions for citizenship, followed naturally from the first: in 451/50 Perikles had a law passed confining citizenship for the future to those whose parents were both Athenian, i.e. the legitimate sons of an Athenian mother as well as father. It is tempting to see Perikles' law in relation to the decision of the Athenians to give pay for jury service: once citizens had got an advantage out of political activity they were glad not to have too many others to share it with. By Perikles' reforms the gulf that separated citizens from non-citizens was made deeper, and the citizenry became a closed population with a very limited potentiality for growth.
Successors of Perikles
The growth of the Athenian Empire and the fear of it amongst the other states led to the Peloponnesian War. The major contestants were, of course, Athens and Sparta. Sparta was the land power, representing and supporting oligarchy; Athens the sea power, supporting democracy and exporting her own constitution to the allied states: the ideological aspect was as important in the conflict as that of power politics. The war lasted twenty-seven years, 431-404; in the first two years Perikles still led Athens, but as a result particularly of the plague in 430-429 he for the first time failed to persuade the people to follow his policies, and was actually sentenced to a big fine in a political trial (429). True enough, the Athenians elected him again to the generalship, but he died soon after entering office, perhaps a victim of the plague.
His death brought a great change into Athenian politics; historians have sometimes made too much of it, but it is authentic enough.
Down to and including Perikles all Athenian leaders (except, perhaps, Ephialtes) had been aristocrats and landowners; after him they were often of lower birth — just as wealthy, but their wealth based more on slave manned workshops.
The new leaders could still be elected generals, but their power was based much more on their ability to persuade the people in the Assembly. …They competed for power, and that was bad for the Athenian conduct of the war: the philosophers disdainfully called them 'demagogues'. But the remaining leaders of the old type … also competed, and their competition was also disastrous. …
… Athens' difficulties in the war grew steadily greater. … The generals were held responsible, and eight of them were impeached for treason, tried (unconstitutionally) all together in the Assembly, and condemned: two were absent, the other six were executed forthwith.
The Trial of the Generals was cited by contemporaries as evidence that assembly democracy was a bad form of government. The Athenians suffered definitive naval defeat … in the following year, and endured four months' siege by the Spartans; and in spring 404 they capitulated, on various terms including the dissolution of the naval empire, the pulling down of the Long Walls and an amnesty for all exiles (which allowed the survivors of the 400 exiled oligarchs to return home).
The constitutional consequences were then spelt out: democracy, people said, was bankrupt. The oligarchs … came to the fore once again… They had the help of the Spartans, who by their naval presence under Lysander forced the people to pass a decree appointing a Commission of Thirty to govern Athens and by a revision of the laws to restore the ancestral constitution. The Thirty were duly appointed and acquired a short popularity by their stern measures against sycophants, but they soon turned themselves into a ruling junta and fully earned the name they have always gone by, the 'Thirty Tyrants’. … A Spartan garrison held the Akropolis, and more than 1500 citizens were put to death … corps of 300 whip-bearers were all the law there was for those who remained; and they were eventually reduced to 3000 full citizens, while all the other Athenians were disfranchised, disarmed and expelled from Athens.
Of course, many loyal democrats had fled; and it was they who gathered and organized the resistance. Early in 403 they entered the Piraeus again … and in a pitched battle … the forces of the oligarchs were defeated … [A] Spartan force … brought the stasis to an end with an enforced compromise: the Athenians could have their democracy back if they would let the oligarchs create their own little polis at Eleusis in north west Attica. In autumn 403 the democrats returned in triumphant procession to Athens and an amnesty was proclaimed; two years later Eleusis was recovered and the remaining oligarchic leaders executed, without intervention by the Spartans. A new amnesty was proclaimed — and this time it was largely respected.
Democracy was restored and even deified: in the fourth century offerings were made to the goddess Demokratia … on the anniversary of the restoration of democracy. The date suggests that the cult of Demokratia, though not attested before the 330s, was in fact set up in 403, when the democrats returned to Athens after the civil war. …
Excursus on Selection of Magistrates [‘Drawing Lots’]
[It] takes one aback that the use of the lot, which is supposed to be par excellence the ‘democratic' way of doing things, should have been introduced as early as the end of the seventh century (minor magistrates) and the beginning of the sixth (archons). Aristotle, it is true, like many of his contemporaries, believed that Athenian democracy was invented by Solon …
… [Can] one rely … on Aristotle … where he carries selection by lot back to Solon? He quotes, indeed, a law of Solon for the proposition that the Treasurers of Athena, one from each tribe, must be selected by lot … but the law in question can only have said that they must be chosen from that class: that they had to be chosen by lot and one from each tribe must be either Aristotle's own paraphrase of a genuine Solonian law … or a quotation from the Solonian law as revised in 403/2.
… Whether one believes or disbelieves that the Athenians were using the lot as early as Solon really depends on one's conception of the original purpose of the lot as a process of selection. Some think that it was only secondarily a democratic procedure, and that it was originally an institution reflecting the nexus of state and religion in archaic Greece: by using the lot you left to the gods the decision about who should run the community. Only in the fifth century was it reinterpreted as the supremely democratic procedure for maintaining the equality of all and their equal right to rule.
Seeking the advice of the gods by means of the lot is, indeed, an age old device in every country all over the world. If you wanted the gods to give sentence in a difficult case you could use the lot, or dice, just as well as ordeal; and, if you wanted to ask them for advice about the future, one well-known method was to offer them a set of alternatives to choose from by a drawing of lots by oracular priests. …
… The sources [for ancient Athens] are in conflict, which shows that the Athenians themselves had no clear knowledge how the archons were chosen in the seventh and sixth centuries; and the only form of selection by lot that can with any plausibility be thought to go back to Solon is the annual sortition of jurors for the People's Court. Against that, there is absolutely no doubt that the selection of the archons by lot in the classical age was a 'democratic' procedure, introduced twenty years after the reforms of Kleisthenes; and, if we ask how it was done before that, it can be said that archons were chosen by direct election in the period 501-487, while before that the evidence is contradictory.
But there is one powerful indication of election as the original procedure for choosing magistrates: in the classical age the Athenians held absolutely fast to the principle that military magistrates must be elected and not selected by lot. It is hardly conceivable that in the seventh and sixth centuries they put themselves in a position of fighting under commanders chosen by lot. … It is just possible that the nine elected archons in the period 501-487 drew lots for which of them should be archon and which king archon and which polemarch [a senior military leader]; but it is extremely unlikely that Solon introduced the procedure by which the polemarch was chosen by lot from an elected short-list of forty, of whom only a few would have been likely to possess the necessary military experience.
These considerations should be sufficient to put out of court the notion that in the archaic age the Athenian magistrates were selected by lot. …
Excursus on ‘Citzenship Law’
… Athens simply had too many citizens to function properly as a polis: in 450 there may have been something like 60,000 adult male citizens. One remedy employed by Perikles was to send thousands of poorer citizens, sometimes to start emigre communities as colonists, but more frequently to various subject cities, where they received plots of land … retaining their Athenian citizenship. But a more important remedy was the citizenship law of 451, by which Athenian citizenship was made to depend on Athenian parentage on both sides, and the son of an Athenian citizen and a foreign woman could no longer be registered in his father's deme as a full citizen; what is more, at least by Demosthenes' time, mixed marriages were actually heavily penalized. Aristotle says explicitly that Perikles' law was enacted 'because of the number of citizens’. …
… Perikles' citizenship law had wide-ranging consequences, ideologically as well as demographically. The citizen population was, even more than before, a closed circle, deliberately isolated from the rest of the population …
The citizen population of Athens had probably been halved in the Peloponnesian War, and it never again approached the size it had been under Perikles, no doubt mainly because a juridically defined group, such as the Athenian citizen body was after 451, was incapable of recovering from the losses from the war (431-404), the plague (430-426), and the famine during the siege of 405/4. Throughout the fourth century, citizen numbers were stationary at about 30,000.
The decline in citizen numbers must have affected all aspects of Athenian society. For one thing, in the fourth century there must, on average, have been twice as much land per citizen, and that may well be one of the reasons why redistribution of land, a major question in other democratic city-states, is never heard of as a problem at Athens. The introduction of pay for attending the Assembly in about 400 may have been another consequence: the Athenians upheld the requirement of a quorum of 6000 for certain types of decree and in the course of the century extended it, for example to citizenship decrees. But, although, after the Peloponnesian War, it became more difficult to collect 6000 citizens, instead of lowering the quorum they preferred to stimulate attendance by paying for participation.
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The Source has been:
Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles and Ideology, translated by J. A. Crook, Blackwell Publishers 1991
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