With Hippias disappeared the mercenary Thracian garrison, upon which he and his father before him had leaned for defence as well as for enforcement of authority; and Kleomenês with his Lacedæmonian forces retired also, after staying only long enough to establish a personal friendship, productive subsequently of important consequences, between the Spartan king and the Athenian Isagoras. The Athenians were thus left to themselves, without any foreign interference to constrain them in their political arrangements.

It has been mentioned in the preceding chapter, that the Peisistratids had for the most part respected the forms of the Solonian constitution: the nine archons, and the probouleutic or preconsidering Senate of Four Hundred (both annually changed), still continued to subsist, together with occasional meetings of the people,—or rather of such portion of the people as was comprised in the gentes, phratries, and four Ionic tribes. The timocratic classification of Solon (or quadruple scale of income and admeasurement of political franchises according to it) also continued to subsist,—but all within the tether and subservient to the purposes of the ruling family, who always kept one of their number as real master, among the chief administrators, and always retained possession of the acropolis as well as of the mercenary force.

That overawing pressure being now removed by the expulsion of Hippias, the enslaved forms became at once endued with freedom and reality. There appeared again, what Attica had not known for thirty years, declared political parties, and pronounced opposition between two men as leaders,—on one side, Isagoras son of Tisander, a person of illustrious descent,—on the other, Kleisthenês the Alkmæônid, not less illustrious, and possessing at this moment a claim on the gratitude of his countrymen as the most persevering as well as the most effective foe of the dethroned despots. In what manner such opposition was carried on we are not told. It would seem to have been not altogether pacific; but at any rate, Kleisthenês had the worst of it, and in consequence of this defeat, says the historian, “he took into partnership the people, who had been before excluded from everything.”[243] His partnership with the people gave birth to the Athenian democracy: it was a real and important revolution.

The political franchise, or the character of an Athenian citizen, both before and since Solon, had been confined to the primitive four Ionic tribes, each of which was an aggregate of so many close corporations or quasi-families,—the gentes and the phratries. None of the residents in Attica, therefore, except those included in some gens or phratry, had any part in the political franchise. Such non-privileged residents were probably at all times numerous, and became more and more so by means of fresh settlers: moreover, they tended most to multiply in Athens and Peiræus, where emigrants would commonly establish themselves. Kleisthenês broke down the existing wall of privilege, and imparted the political franchise to the excluded mass. But this could not be done by enrolling them in new gentes or phratries, created in addition to the old; for the gentile tie was founded upon old faith and feeling, which, in the existing state of the Greek mind, could not be suddenly conjured up as a bond of union for comparative strangers: it could only be done by disconnecting the franchise altogether from the Ionic tribes as well as from the gentes which constituted them, and by redistributing the population into new tribes with a character and purpose exclusively political. Accordingly, Kleisthenês abolished the four Ionic tribes, and created in their place ten new tribes founded upon a different principle, independent of the gentes and phratries. Each of his new tribes comprised a certain number of demes or cantons, with the enrolled proprietors and residents in each of them. The demes taken altogether included the entire surface of Attica, so that the Kleisthenean constitution admitted to the political franchise all the free native Athenians; and not merely these, but also many Metics, and even some of the superior order of slaves.[244] Putting out of sight the general body of slaves, and regarding only the free inhabitants, it was in point of fact a scheme approaching to universal suffrage, both political and judicial.

The slight and cursory manner in which Herodotus announces this memorable revolution tends to make us overlook its real importance. He dwells chiefly on the alteration in the number and names of the tribes: Kleisthenês, he says, despised the Ionians so much, that he would not tolerate the continuance in Attica of the four tribes which prevailed in the Ionic cities,[245] deriving their names from the four sons of Ion,—just as his grandfather, the Sikyonian Kleisthenês, hating the Dorians, had degraded and nicknamed the three Dorian tribes at Sikyôn. Such is the representation of Herodotus, who seems himself to have entertained some contempt for the Ionians,[246] and therefore to have suspected a similar feeling where it had no real existence. But the scope of Kleisthenês was something far more extensive: he abolished the four ancient tribes, not because they were Ionic, but because they had become incommensurate with the existing condition of the Attic people, and because such abolition procured both for himself and for his political scheme new as well as hearty allies. And indeed, if we study the circumstances of the case, we shall see very obvious reasons to suggest the proceeding. For more than thirty years—an entire generation—the old constitution had been a mere empty formality, working only in subservience to the reigning dynasty, and stripped of all real controlling power. We may be very sure, therefore, that both the Senate of Four Hundred and the popular assembly, divested of that free speech which imparted to them not only all their value but all their charm, had come to be of little public estimation, and were probably attended only by a few partisans; and thus the difference between qualified citizens and men not so qualified,—between members of the four old tribes, and men not members,—became during this period practically effaced. This, in fact, was the only species of good which a Grecian despotism ever seems to have done: it confounded the privileged and the non-privileged under one coercive authority common to both, so that the distinction between the two was not easy to revive when the despotism passed away. As soon as Hippias was expelled, the senate and the public assembly regained their efficiency. But had they been continued on the old footing, including none except members of the four tribes, these tribes would have been reinvested with a privilege which in reality they had so long lost, that its revival would have seemed an odious novelty, and the remaining population would probably not have submitted to it. If, in addition, we consider the political excitement of the moment,—the restoration of one body of men from exile, and the departure of another body into exile,—the outpouring of long-suppressed hatred, partly against these very forms, by the corruption of which the despot had reigned,—we shall see that prudence as well as patriotism dictated the adoption of an enlarged scheme of government. Kleisthenês had learned some wisdom during his long exile; and as he probably continued, for some time after the introduction of his new constitution, to be the chief adviser of his countrymen, we may consider their extraordinary success as a testimony to his prudence and skill not less than to their courage and unanimity.

Nor does it seem unreasonable to give him credit for a more generous forward movement than what is implied in the literal account of Herodotus. Instead of being forced against his will to purchase popular support by proposing this new constitution, Kleisthenês may have proposed it before, during the discussions which immediately followed the retirement of Hippias; so that the rejection of it formed the ground of quarrel—and no other ground is mentioned—between him and Isagoras. The latter doubtless found sufficient support, in the existing senate and public assembly, to prevent it from being carried without an actual appeal to the people, and his opposition to it is not difficult to understand. For, necessary as the change had become, it was not the less a shock to ancient Attic ideas. It radically altered the very idea of a tribe, which now became an aggregation of demes, not of gentes,—of fellow-demots, not of fellow-gentiles; and it thus broke up those associations, religious, social, and political, between the whole and the parts of the old system, which operated powerfully on the mind of every old-fashioned Athenian. The patricians at Rome, who composed the gentes and curiæ,—and the plebs, who had no part in these corporations,—formed for a long time two separate and opposing fractions in the same city, each with its own separate organization. It was only by slow degrees that the plebs gained ground, and the political value of the patrician gens was long maintained alongside of and apart from the plebeian tribe. So too in the Italian and German cities of the Middle Ages, the patrician families refused to part with their own separate political identity, when the guilds grew up by the side of them; even though forced to renounce a portion of their power, they continued to be a separate fraternity, and would not submit to be regimented anew, under an altered category and denomination, along with the traders who had grown into wealth and importance.[247] But the reform of Kleisthenês effected this change all at once, both as to the name and as to the reality. In some cases, indeed, that which had been the name of a gens was retained as the name of a deme, but even then the old gentiles were ranked indiscriminately among the remaining demots; and the Athenian people, politically considered, thus became one homogeneous whole, distributed for convenience into parts, numerical, local, and politically equal. It is, however, to be remembered, that while the four Ionic tribes were abolished, the gentes and phratries which composed them were left untouched, and continued to subsist as family and religious associations, though carrying with them no political privilege.

The ten newly-created tribes, arranged in an established order of precedence, were called,—Erechthêis, Ægêis, Pandiŏnis, Leontis, Akamantis, Œnêis, Kekrŏpis, Hippothoöntis, Æantis, Antiochis; names borrowed chiefly from the respected heroes of Attic legend.[248] This number remained unaltered until the year 305 B. C., when it was increased to twelve by the addition of two new tribes, Antigonias and Demetrias, afterwards designated anew by the names of Ptolemais and Attalis. The mere names of these last two, borrowed from living kings, and not from legendary heroes, betray the change from freedom to subservience at Athens. Each tribe comprised a certain number of demes,—cantons, parishes, or townships,—in Attica. But the total number of these demes is not distinctly ascertained; for though we know that, in the time of Polemô (the third century B. C.), it was one hundred and seventy-four, we cannot be sure that it had always remained the same; and several critics construe the words of Herodotus to imply that Kleisthenês at first recognized exactly one hundred demes, distributed in equal proportion among his ten tribes.[249] But such construction of the words is more than doubtful, while the fact itself is improbable; partly because if the change of number had been so considerable as the difference between one hundred and one hundred and seventy-four, some positive evidence of it would probably be found,—partly because Kleisthenês would, indeed, have a motive to render the amount of citizen population nearly equal, but no motive to render the number of demes equal, in each of the ten tribes. It is well known how great is the force of local habits, and how unalterable are parochial or cantonal boundaries. In the absence of proof to the contrary, therefore, we may reasonably suppose the number and circumscription of the demes, as found or modified by Kleisthenês, to have subsisted afterwards with little alteration, at least until the increase in the number of the tribes.

There is another point, however, which is at once more certain, and more important to notice. The demes which Kleisthenês assigned to each tribe were in no case all adjacent to each other; and therefore the tribe, as a whole, did not correspond with any continuous portion of the territory, nor could it have any peculiar local interest, separate from the entire community. Such systematic avoidance of the factions arising out of neighborhood will appear to have been more especially necessary, when we recollect that the quarrels of the Parali, the Diakrii, the Pediaki, during the preceding century, had all been generated from local feud, though doubtless artfully fomented by individual ambition. Moreover, it was only by this same precaution that the local predominance of the city, and the formation of a city-interest distinct from that of the country, was obviated; which could hardly have failed to arise had the city by itself constituted either one deme or one tribe. Kleisthenês distributed the city (or found it already distributed) into several demes, and those demes among several tribes; while Peiræus and Phalêrum, each constituting a separate deme, were also assigned to different tribes; so that there were no local advantages either to bestow predominance, or to create a struggle for predominance, of one tribe over the rest.[250] Each deme had its own local interests to watch over; but the tribe was a mere aggregate of demes for political, military, and religious purposes, with no separate hopes or fears, apart from the whole state. Each tribe had a chapel, sacred rites and festivals, and a common fund for such meetings, in honor of its eponymous hero, administered by members of its own choice;[251] and the statues of all the ten eponymous heroes, fraternal patrons of the democracy, were planted in the most conspicuous part of the agora of Athens. In the future working of the Athenian government, we shall trace no symptom of disquieting local factions,—a capital amendment, compared with the disputes of the preceding century, and traceable, in part, to the absence of border-relations between demes of the same tribe.

The deme now became the primitive constituent element of the commonwealth, both as to persons and as to property. It had its own demarch, its register of enrolled citizens, its collective property, its public meetings and religious ceremonies, its taxes levied and administered by itself. The register of qualified citizens[252] was kept by the demarch, and the inscription of new citizens took place at the assembly of the demots, whose legitimate sons were enrolled on attaining the age of eighteen, and their adopted sons at any time when presented and sworn to by the adopting citizen. The citizenship could only be granted by a public vote of the people, but wealthy non-freemen were enabled sometimes to evade this law and purchase admission upon the register of some poor deme, probably by means of a fictitious adoption. At the meetings of the demots, the register was called over, and it sometimes happened that some names were expunged,—in which case the party thus disfranchised had an appeal to the popular judicature.[253] So great was the local administrative power, however, of these demes, that they are described as the substitute,[254] under the Kleisthenean system, for the naukraries under the Solonian and ante-Solonian. The trittyes and naukraries, though nominally preserved, and the latter (as some affirm) augmented in number from forty-eight to fifty, appear henceforward as of little public importance.

Kleisthenês preserved, but at the same time modified and expanded, all the main features of Solon’s political constitution; the public assembly, or ekklesia,—the preconsidering senate, composed of members from all the tribes,—and the habit of annual election, as well as annual responsibility of magistrates, by and to the ekklesia. The full value must now have been felt of possessing such preëxisting institutions to build upon, at a moment of perplexity and dissension. But the Kleisthenean ekklesia acquired new strength, and almost a new character, from the great increase of the number of citizens qualified to attend it; while the annually-changed senate, instead of being composed of four hundred members taken in equal proportion from each of the old four tribes, was enlarged to five hundred, taken equally from each of the new ten tribes. It now comes before us, under the name of Senate of Five Hundred, as an active and indispensable body throughout the whole Athenian democracy: and the practice now seems to have begun (though the period of commencement cannot be decisively proved), of determining the names of the senators by lot. Both the senate thus constituted, and the public assembly, were far more popular and vigorous than they had been under the original arrangement of Solon.

The new constitution of the tribes, as it led to a change in the annual senate, so it transformed, no less directly, the military arrangements of the state, both as to soldiers and as to officers. The citizens called upon to serve in arms were now marshalled according to tribes,—each tribe having its own taxiarchs as officers for the hoplites, and its own phylarch at the head of the horsemen. Moreover, there were now created for the first time ten strategi, or generals, one from each tribe; and two hipparchs, for the supreme command of the horsemen. Under the prior Athenian constitution it appears that the command of the military force had been vested in the third archon, or polemarch, no strategi then existing; and even after the latter had been created, under the Kleisthenean constitution, the polemarch still retained a joint right of command along with them,—as we are told at the battle of Marathon, where Kallimachus the polemarch not only enjoyed an equal vote in the council of war along with the ten strategi, but even occupied the post of honor on the right wing.[255] The ten generals, annually changed, are thus (like the ten tribes) a fruit of the Kleisthenean constitution, which was at the same time powerfully strengthened and protected by such remodelling of the military force. The functions of the generals becoming more extensive as the democracy advanced, they seem to have acquired gradually not merely the direction of military and naval affairs, but also that of the foreign relations of the city generally,—while the nine archons, including the polemarch, were by degrees lowered down from that full executive and judicial competence which they had once enjoyed, to the simple ministry of police and preparatory justice. Encroached upon by the strategi on one side, they were also restricted in efficiency by the rise of the popular dikasteries or numerous jury-courts, on the other. We may be very sure that these popular dikasteries had not been permitted to meet or to act under the despotism of the Peisistratids, and that the judicial business of the city must then have been conducted partly by the Senate of Areopagus, partly by the archons; perhaps with a nominal responsibility of the latter at the end of their year of office to an acquiescent ekklesia. And if we even assume it to be true, as some writers contend, that the habit of direct popular judicature, over and above this annual trial of responsibility, had been partially introduced by Solon, it must have been discontinued during the long coercion exercised by the supervening dynasty. But the outburst of popular spirit, which lent force to Kleisthenês, doubtless carried the people into direct action as jurors in the aggregate Heliæa, not less than as voters in the ekklesia,—and the change was thus begun which contributed to degrade the archons from their primitive character as judges, into the lower function of preliminary examiners and presidents of a jury. Such convocation of numerous juries, beginning first with the aggregate body of sworn citizens above thirty years of age, and subsequently dividing them into separate bodies or pannels, for trying particular causes, became gradually more frequent and more systematized: until at length, in the time of Periklês, it was made to carry a small pay, and stood out as one of the most prominent features of Athenian life. We cannot particularize the different steps whereby such final development was attained, and the judicial competence of the archon cut down to the mere power of inflicting a small fine; but the first steps of it are found in the revolution of Kleisthenês, and it seems to have been consummated by the reforms of Periklês. Of the function exercised by the nine archons as well as by many other magistrates and official persons at Athens, in convoking a dikastery, or jury-court, bringing on causes for trial,—and presiding over the trial,—a function constituting one of the marks of superior magistracy, and called the Hegemony, or presidency of a dikastery,—I shall speak more at length hereafter. At present, I wish merely to bring to view the increased and increasing sphere of action on which the people entered at the memorable turn of affairs now before us.

The financial affairs of the city underwent at this epoch as complete a change as the military: in fact, the appointment of magistrates and officers by tens, one from each tribe, seems to have become the ordinary practice. A board of ten, called Apodektæ, were invested with the supreme management of the exchequer, dealing with the contractors as to those portions of the revenue which were farmed, receiving all the taxes from the collectors, and disbursing them under competent authority. The first nomination of this board is expressly ascribed to Kleisthenês,[256] as a substitute for certain persons called Kôlakretæ, who had performed the same function before, and who were now retained only for subordinate services. The duties of the apodektæ were afterwards limited to receiving the public income, and paying it over to the ten treasurers of the goddess Athênê, by whom it was kept in the inner chamber of the Parthenon, and disbursed as needed; but this more complicated arrangement cannot be referred to Kleisthenês. From his time forward too, the Senate of Five Hundred steps far beyond its original duty of preparing matters for the discussion of the ekklesia: it embraces, besides, a large circle of administrative and general superintendence, which hardly admits of any definition. Its sittings become constant, with the exception of special holidays, and the year is distributed into ten portions called Prytanies,—the fifty senators of each tribe taking by turns the duty of constant attendance during one prytany, and receiving during that time the title of The Prytanes: the order of precedence among the tribes in these duties was annually determined by lot. In the ordinary Attic year of twelve lunar months, or three hundred and fifty-four days, six of the prytanies contained thirty-five days, four of them contained thirty-six: in the intercalated years of thirteen months, the number of days was thirty-eight and thirty-nine respectively. Moreover, a farther subdivision of the prytany into five periods of seven days each, and of the fifty tribe-senators into five bodies of ten each, was recognized: each body of ten presided in the senate for one period of seven days, drawing lots every day among their number for a new chairman, called Epistatês, to whom during his day of office were confided the keys of the acropolis and the treasury, together with the city seal. The remaining senators, not belonging to the prytanizing tribe, might of course attend if they chose; but the attendance of nine among them, one from each of the remaining nine tribes, was imperatively necessary to constitute a valid meeting, and to insure a constant representation of the collective people.

During those later times known to us through the great orators, the ekklesia, or formal assembly of the citizens, was convoked four times regularly during each prytany, or oftener if necessity required,—usually by the senate, though the stratêgi had also the power of convoking it by their own authority. It was presided over by the prytanes, and questions were put to the vote by their epistatês, or chairman; but the nine representatives of the non-prytanizing tribes were always present as a matter of course, and seem, indeed, in the days of the orators, to have acquired to themselves the direction of it, together with the right of putting questions for the vote,[257]—setting aside wholly or partially the fifty prytanes. When we carry our attention back, however, to the state of the ekklesia, as first organized by Kleisthenês (I have already remarked that expositors of the Athenian constitution are too apt to neglect the distinction of times, and to suppose that what was the practice between 400-330 B. C. had been always the practice), it will appear probable that he provided one regular meeting in each prytany, and no more; giving to the senate and the stratêgi power of convening special meetings if needful, but establishing one ekklesia during each prytany, or ten in the year, as a regular necessity of state. How often the ancient ekklesia had been convoked during the interval between Solon and Peisistratus, we cannot exactly say,—probably but seldom during the year. But under the Peisistratids, its convocation had dwindled down into an inoperative formality; and the reëstablishment of it by Kleisthenês, not merely with plenary determining powers, but also under full notice and preparation of matters beforehand, together with the best securities for orderly procedure, was in itself a revolution impressive to the mind of every Athenian citizen. To render the ekklesia efficient, it was indispensable that its meetings should be both frequent and free. Men thus became trained to the duty both of speakers and hearers, and each man, while he felt that he exercised his share of influence on the decision, identified his own safety and happiness with the vote of the majority, and became familiarized with the notion of a sovereign authority which he neither could nor ought to resist. This is an idea new to the Athenian bosom; and with it came the feelings sanctifying free speech and equal law,—words which no Athenian citizen ever afterwards heard unmoved: together with that sentiment of the entire commonwealth as one and indivisible, which always overruled, though it did not supplant, the local and cantonal special ties. It is not too much to say that these patriotic and ennobling impulses were a new product in the Athenian mind, to which nothing analogous occurs even in the time of Solon. They were kindled in part doubtless by the strong reaction against the Peisistratids, but still more by the fact that the opposing leader, Kleisthenês, turned that transitory feeling to the best possible account, and gave to it a vigorous perpetuity, as well as a well-defined positive object, by the popular elements conspicuous in his constitution. His name makes less figure in history than we should expect, because he passed for the mere renovator of Solon’s scheme of government after it had been overthrown by Peisistratus. Probably he himself professed this object, since it would facilitate the success of his propositions: and if we confine ourselves to the letter of the case, the fact is in a great measure true, since the annual senate and the ekklesia are both Solonian,—but both of them under his reform were clothed in totally new circumstances, and swelled into gigantic proportions. How vigorous was the burst of Athenian enthusiasm, altering instantaneously the position of Athens among the powers of Greece, we shall hear presently from the lips of Herodotus, and shall find still more unequivocally marked in the facts of his history.

But it was not only the people formally installed in their ekklesia, who received from Kleisthenês the real attributes of sovereignty,—it was by him also that the people were first called into direct action as dikasts, or jurors. I have already remarked, that this custom may be said, in a certain limited sense, to have begun in the time of Solon, since that lawgiver invested the popular assembly with the power of pronouncing the judgment of accountability upon the archons after their year of office. Here, again, the building, afterwards so spacious and stately, was erected on a Solonian foundation, though it was not itself Solonian. That the popular dikasteries, in the elaborate form in which they existed from Periklês downward, were introduced all at once by Kleisthenês, it is impossible to believe; yet the steps by which they were gradually wrought out are not distinctly discoverable. It would rather seem, that at first only the aggregate body of citizens above thirty years of age exercised judicial functions, being specially convoked and sworn to try persons accused of public crimes, and when so employed bearing the name of the heliæa, or heliasts; private offences and disputes between man and man being still determined by individual magistrates in the city, and a considerable judicial power still residing in the Senate of Areopagus. There is reason to believe that this was the state of things established by Kleisthenês, and which afterwards came to be altered by the greater extent of judicial duty gradually accruing to the heliasts, so that it was necessary to subdivide the collective heliæa. According to the subdivision, as practised in the times best known, six thousand citizens above thirty years of age were annually selected by lot out of the whole number, six hundred from each of the ten tribes: five thousand of these citizens were arranged in ten pannels or decuries of five hundred each, the remaining one thousand being reserved to fill up vacancies in case of death or absence among the former. The whole six thousand took a prescribed oath, couched in very striking words, and every man received a ticket inscribed with his own name as well as with a letter designating his decury. When there were causes or crimes ripe for trial, the thesmothets, or six inferior archons, determined by lot, first, which decuries should sit, according to the number wanted,—next, in which court, or under the presidency of what magistrate, the decury B or E should sit, so that it could not be known beforehand in what cause each would be judge. In the number of persons who actually attended and sat, however, there seems to have been much variety, and sometimes two decuries sat together.[258] The arrangement here described, we must recollect, is given to us as belonging to those times when the dikasts received a regular pay, after every day’s sitting; and it can hardly have long continued without that condition, which was not realized before the time of Periklês. Each of these decuries sitting in judicature was called The Heliæa,—a name which belongs properly to the collective assembly of the people; this collective assembly having been itself the original judicature. I conceive that the practice of distributing this collective assembly, or heliæa, into sections of jurors for judicial duty, may have begun under one form or another soon after the reform of Kleisthenês, since the direct interference of the people in public affairs tended more and more to increase. But it could only have been matured by degrees into that constant and systematic service which the pay of Periklês called forth at last in completeness. Under the last-mentioned system the judicial competence of the archons was annulled, and the third archon, or polemarch, withdrawn from all military functions. Still, this had not been yet done at the time of the battle of Marathon, in which Kallimachus the polemarch not only commanded along with the stratêgi, but enjoyed a sort of preëminence over them: nor had it been done during the year after the battle of Marathon, in which Aristeidês was archon,—for the magisterial decisions of Aristeidês formed one of the principal foundations of his honorable surname, the Just.[259]

With this question, as to the comparative extent of judicial power vested by Kleisthenês in the popular dikastery and the archons, are in reality connected two others in Athenian constitutional law; relating, first, to the admissibility of all citizens for the post of archon,—next, to the choosing of archons by lot. It is well known that, in the time of Periklês, the archons, and various other individual functionaries, had come to be chosen by lot,—moreover, all citizens were legally admissible, and might give in their names to be drawn for by lot, subject to what was called the dokimasy, or legal examination into their status of citizen, and into various moral and religious qualifications, before they took office; while at the same time the function of the archon had become nothing higher than preliminary examination of parties and witnesses for the dikastery, and presidence over it when afterwards assembled, together with the power of imposing by authority a fine of small amount upon inferior offenders.

Now all these three political arrangements hang essentially together. The great value of the lot, according to Grecian democratical ideas, was that it equalized the chance of office between rich and poor. But so long as the poor citizens were legally inadmissible, choice by lot could have no recommendation either to the rich or to the poor; in fact, it would be less democratical than election by the general mass of citizens, because the poor citizen would under the latter system enjoy an important right of interference by means of his suffrage, though he could not be elected himself.[260] Again, choice by lot could never under any circumstances be applied to those posts where special competence, and a certain measure of attributes possessed only by a few, could not be dispensed with without obvious peril,—nor was it ever applied, throughout the whole history of democratical Athens, to the stratêgi, or generals, who were always elected by show of hands of the assembled citizens. Accordingly, we may regard it as certain that, at the time when the archons first came to be chosen by lot, the superior and responsible duties once attached to that office had been, or were in course of being, detached from it, and transferred either to the popular dikasts or to the ten elected stratêgi: so that there remained to these archons only a routine of police and administration, important indeed to the state, yet such as could be executed by any citizen of average probity, diligence, and capacity. At least there was no obvious absurdity in thinking so; and the dokimasy excluded from the office men of notoriously discreditable life, even after they might have drawn the successful lot. Periklês,[261] though chosen stratêgus, year after year successively, was never archon; and it may even be doubted whether men of first-rate talents and ambition often gave in their names for the office. To those of smaller aspirations[262] it was doubtless a source of importance, but it imposed troublesome labor, gave no pay, and entailed a certain degree of peril upon any archon who might have given offence to powerful men, when he came to pass through the trial of accountability which followed immediately upon his year of office. There was little to make the office acceptable either to very poor men, or to very rich and ambitious men; and between the middling persons who gave in their names, any one might be taken without great practical mischief, always assuming the two guarantees of the dokimasy before, and accountability after, office. This was the conclusion—in my opinion a mistaken conclusion, and such as would find no favor at present—to which the democrats of Athens were conducted by their strenuous desire to equalize the chances of office for rich and poor. But their sentiment seems to have been satisfied by a partial enforcement of the lot to the choice of some offices,—especially the archons, as the primitive chief magistrates of the state,—without applying it to all, or to the most responsible and difficult. Nor would they have applied it to the archons, if it had been indispensably necessary that these magistrates should retain their original very serious duty of judging disputes and condemning offenders.

I think, therefore, that these three points: 1. The opening of the post of archon to all citizens indiscriminately; 2. The choice of archons by lot; 3. The diminished range of the archon’s duties and responsibilities, through the extension of those belonging to the popular courts of justice on the one hand and to the stratêgi on the other—are all connected together, and must have been simultaneous, or nearly simultaneous, in the time of introduction: the enactment of universal admissibility to office certainly not coming after the other two, and probably coming a little before them.

Now in regard to the eligibility of all Athenians indiscriminately to the office of archon, we find a clear and positive testimony as to the time when it was first introduced. Plutarch tells us[263] that the oligarchical,[264] but high-principled Aristeidês, was himself the proposer of this constitutional change,—shortly after the battle of Platæa, with the consequent expulsion of the Persians from Greece, and the return of the refugee Athenians to their ruined city. Seldom has it happened in the history of mankind, that rich and poor have been so completely equalized as among the population of Athens in that memorable expatriation and heroic struggle. Nor are we at all surprised to hear that the mass of the citizens, coming back with freshly-kindled patriotism as well as with the consciousness that their country had only been recovered by the equal efforts of all, would no longer submit to be legally disqualified from any office of state. It was on this occasion that the constitution was first made really “common” to all, and that the archons, stratêgi, and all functionaries, first began to be chosen from all Athenians without any difference of legal eligibility.[265] No mention is made of the lot, in this important statement of Plutarch, which appears to me every way worthy of credit, and which teaches us that, down to the invasion of Xerxês, not only had the exclusive principle of the Solonian law of qualification continued in force (whereby the first three classes on the census were alone admitted to all individual offices, and the fourth or Thêtic class excluded), but also the archons had hitherto been elected by the citizens,—not taken by lot.

Now for financial purposes, the quadruple census of Solon was retained long after this period, even beyond the Peloponnesian war and the oligarchy of Thirty. But we thus learn that Kleisthenês in his constitution retained it for political purposes also, in part at least: he recognized the exclusion of the great mass of the citizens from all individual offices,—such as the archon, the stratêgus, etc. In his time, probably, no complaints were raised on the subject. His constitution gave to the collective bodies—senate, ekklesia, and heliæa, or dikastery—a degree of power and importance such as they had never before known or imagined: and we may well suppose that the Athenian people of that day had no objection even to the proclaimed system and theory of being exclusively governed by men of wealth and station as individual magistrates,—especially since many of the newly-enfranchised citizens had been previously metics and slaves. Indeed, it is to be added that, even under the full democracy of later Athens, though the people had then become passionately attached to the theory of equal admissibility of all citizens to office, yet, in practice, poor men seldom obtained offices which were elected by the general vote, as will appear more fully in the course of this history.[266]

The choice of the stratêgi remained ever afterwards upon the footing on which Aristeidês thus placed it. But the lot for the choice of archon must have been introduced shortly after his proposition of universal eligibility, and in consequence too of the same tide of democratical feeling,—introduced as a farther corrective, because the poor citizen, though he had become eligible, was nevertheless not elected. And at the same time, I imagine, that elaborate distribution of the Heliæa, or aggregate body of dikasts, or jurors, into separate pannels, or dikasteries, for the decision of judicial matters, was first regularized. It was this change that stole away from the archons so important a part of their previous jurisdiction: it was this change that Periklês more fully consummated by insuring pay to the dikasts. But the present is not the time to enter into the modifications which Athens underwent during the generation after the battle of Platæa. They have been here briefly noticed for the purpose of reasoning back, in the absence of direct evidence, to Athens as it stood in the generation before that memorable battle, after the reform of Kleisthenês. His reform, though highly democratical, stopped short of the mature democracy which prevailed from Periklês to Demosthenês, in three ways especially, among various others; and it is therefore sometimes considered by the later writers as an aristocratical constitution:[267] 1. It still recognized the archons as judges to a considerable extent, and the third archon, or polemarch, as joint military commander along with the stratêgi. 2. It retained them as elected annually by the body of citizens, not as chosen by lot.[268] 3. It still excluded the fourth class of the Solonian census from all individual office, the archonship among the rest. The Solonian law of exclusion, however, though retained in principle, was mitigated in practice thus far,—that whereas Solon had rendered none but members of the highest class on the census (the Pentakosiomedimni) eligible to the archonship, Kleisthenês opened that dignity to all the first three classes, shutting out only the fourth. That he did this may be inferred from the fact that Aristeidês, assuredly not a rich man, became archon.

I am also inclined to believe that the Senate of Five Hundred, as constituted by Kleisthenês, was taken, not by election, but by lot, from the ten tribes,—and that every citizen became eligible to it. Election for this purpose—that is, the privilege of annually electing a batch of fifty senators, all at once, by each tribe—would probably be thought more troublesome than valuable; nor do we hear of separate meetings of each tribe for purposes of election. Moreover, the office of senator was a collective, not an individual office; the shock, therefore, to the feelings of semi-democratized Athens, from the unpleasant idea of a poor man sitting among the fifty prytanes, would be less than if they conceived him as polemarch at the head of the right wing of the army, or as an archon administering justice.

A farther difference between the constitution of Solon and that of Kleisthenês is to be found in the position of the Senate of Areopagus. Under the former, that senate had been the principal body in the state, and he had even enlarged its powers; under the latter, it must have been treated at first as an enemy, and kept down. For as it was composed only of all the past archons, and as, during the preceding thirty years, every archon had been a creature of the Peisistratids, the Areopagites collectively must have been both hostile and odious to Kleisthenês and his partisans,—perhaps a fraction of its members might even retire into exile with Hippias. Its influence must have been sensibly lessened by the change of party, until it came to be gradually filled by fresh archons springing from the bosom of the Kleisthenean constitution. But during this important interval, the new-modelled Senate of Five Hundred, and the popular assembly, stepped into that ascendency which they never afterwards lost. From the time of Kleisthenês forward, the Areopagites cease to be the chief and prominent power in the state: yet they are still considerable; and when the second fill of the democratical tide took place, after the battle of Platæa, they became the focus of that which was then considered as the party of oligarchical resistance. I have already remarked that the archons, during the intermediate time (about 509-477 B. C.), were all elected by the ekklesia, not chosen by lot,—and that the fourth (or poorest and most numerous) class on the census were by law then ineligible; while election at Athens, even when every citizen without exception was an elector and eligible, had a natural tendency to fall upon men of wealth and station. We thus see how it happened that the past archons, when united in the Senate of Areopagus, infused into that body the sympathies, prejudices, and interests of the richer classes. It was this which brought them into conflict with the more democratical party headed by Periklês and Ephialtês, in times when portions of the Kleisthenean constitution had come to be discredited as too much imbued with oligarchy.

One other remarkable institution, distinctly ascribed to Kleisthenês, yet remains to be noticed,—the Ostracism; upon which I have already made some remarks,[269] in touching upon the memorable Solonian proclamation against neutrality in a sedition. It is hardly too much to say that, without this protective process, none of the other institutions would have reached maturity.

By the ostracism, a citizen was banished without special accusation, trial, or defence, for a term of ten years,—subsequently diminished to five. His property was not taken away, nor his reputation tainted; so that the penalty consisted solely in the banishment from his native city to some other Greek city. As to reputation, the ostracism was a compliment rather than otherwise;[270] and so it was vividly felt to be, when, about ninety years after Kleisthenês, the conspiracy between Nikias and Alkibiadês fixed it upon Hyperbolus. The two former had both recommended the taking of an ostracizing vote, each hoping to cause the banishment of the other; but before the day arrived, they accommodated the difference. To fire off the safety-gun of the republic against a person so little dangerous as Hyperbolus, was denounced as the prostitution of a great political ceremony: “it was not against such men as him (said the comic writer, Plato),[271] that the oyster-shell (or potsherd) was intended to be used.” The process of ostracism was carried into effect by writing upon a shell, or potsherd, the name of the person whom a citizen thought it prudent for a time to banish; which shell, when deposited in the proper vessel, counted for a vote towards the sentence.

I have already observed that all the governments of the Grecian cities, when we compare them with that idea which a modern reader is apt to conceive of the measure of force belonging to a government, were essentially weak, the good as well as the bad,—the democratical, the oligarchical, and the despotic. The force in the hands of any government, to cope with conspirators or mutineers, was extremely small, with the single exception of a despot surrounded by his mercenary troop; so that no tolerably sustained conspiracy or usurper could be put down except by the direct aid of the people in support of the government; which amounted to a dissolution, for the time, of constitutional authority, and was pregnant with reactionary consequences such as no man could foresee. To prevent powerful men from attempting usurpation was, therefore, of the greatest possible moment; and a despot or an oligarchy might exercise preventive means at pleasure,[272] much sharper than the ostracism, such as the assassination of Kimon, mentioned in my last chapter, as directed by the Peisistratids. At the very least, they might send away any one, from whom they apprehended attack or danger, without incurring even so much as the imputation of severity. But in a democracy, where arbitrary action of the magistrate was the thing of all others most dreaded, and where fixed laws, with trial and defence as preliminaries to punishment, were conceived by the ordinary citizen as the guarantees of his personal security and as the pride of his social condition,—the creation of such an exceptional power presented serious difficulty. If we transport ourselves to the times of Kleisthenês, immediately after the expulsion of the Peisistratids, when the working of the democratical machinery was as yet untried, we shall find this difficulty at its maximum; but we shall also find the necessity of vesting such a power somewhere absolutely imperative. For the great Athenian nobles had yet to learn the lesson of respect for any constitution; their past history had exhibited continual struggles between the armed factions of Megaklês, Lykurgus, and Peisistratus, put down after a time by the superior force and alliances of the latter. And though Kleisthenês, the son of Megaklês, might be firmly disposed to renounce the example of his father, and to act as the faithful citizen of a fixed constitution,—he would know but too well that the sons of his father’s companions and rivals would follow out ambitious purposes without any regard to the limits imposed by law, if ever they acquired sufficient partisans to present a fair prospect of success. Moreover, when any two candidates for power, with such reckless dispositions, came into a bitter personal rivalry, the motives to each of them, arising as well out of fear as out of ambition, to put down his opponent at any cost to the constitution, might well become irresistible, unless some impartial and discerning interference could arrest the strife in time. “If the Athenians were wise (Aristeidês is reported to have said,[273] in the height and peril of his parliamentary struggle with Themistoklês), they would cast both Themistoklês and me into the barathrum.”[274] And whoever reads the sad narrative of the Korkyræan sedition, in the third book of Thucydidês, together with the reflections of the historian upon it,[275] will trace the gradual exasperation of these party feuds, beginning even under democratical forms, until at length they break down the barriers of public as well as of private morality.

Against this chance of internal assailants Kleisthenês had to protect the democratical constitution,—first, by throwing impediments in their way and rendering it difficult for them to procure the requisite support; next, by eliminating them before any violent projects were ripe for execution. To do either the one or the other, it was necessary to provide such a constitution as would not only conciliate the good-will, but kindle the passionate attachment, of the mass of citizens, insomuch that not even any considerable minority should be deliberately inclined to alter it by force. It was necessary to create in the multitude, and through them to force upon the leading ambitious men, that rare and difficult sentiment which we may term a constitutional morality; a paramount reverence for the forms of the constitution, enforcing obedience to the authorities acting under and within those forms, yet combined with the habit of open speech, of action subject only to definite legal control, and unrestrained censure of those very authorities as to all their public acts,—combined too with a perfect confidence in the bosom of every citizen, amidst the bitterness of party contest, that the forms of the constitution will be not less sacred in the eyes of his opponents than in his own. This coexistence of freedom and self-imposed restraint,—of obedience to authority with unmeasured censure of the persons exercising it,—may be found in the aristocracy of England (since about 1688) as well as in the democracy of the American United States: and because we are familiar with it, we are apt to suppose it a natural sentiment; though there seem to be few sentiments more difficult to establish and diffuse among a community, judging by the experience of history. We may see how imperfectly it exists at this day in the Swiss cantons; and the many violences of the first French revolution illustrate, among various other lessons, the fatal effects arising from its absence, even among a people high in the scale of intelligence. Yet the diffusion of such constitutional morality, not merely among the majority of any community, but throughout the whole, is the indispensable condition of a government at once free and peaceable; since even any powerful and obstinate minority may render the working of free institutions impracticable, without being strong enough to conquer ascendency for themselves. Nothing less than unanimity, or so overwhelming a majority as to be tantamount to unanimity, on the cardinal point of respecting constitutional forms, even by those who do not wholly approve of them, can render the excitement of political passion bloodless, and yet expose all the authorities in the state to the full license of pacific criticism.

At the epoch of Kleisthenês, which by a remarkable coincidence is the same as that of the regifuge at Rome, such constitutional morality, if it existed anywhere else, had certainly no place at Athens; and the first creation of it in any particular society must be esteemed an interesting historical fact. By the spirit of his reforms,—equal, popular, and comprehensive, far beyond the previous experience of Athenians,—he secured the hearty attachment of the body of citizens; but from the first generation of leading men, under the nascent democracy, and with such precedents as they had to look back upon, no self-imposed limits to ambition could be expected: and the problem required was to eliminate beforehand any one about to transgress these limits, so as to escape the necessity of putting him down afterwards, with all that bloodshed and reaction, in the midst of which the free working of the constitution would be suspended at least, if not irrevocably extinguished. To acquire such influence as would render him dangerous under democratical forms, a man must stand in evidence before the public, so as to afford some reasonable means of judging of his character and purposes; and the security which Kleisthenês provided, was, to call in the positive judgment of the citizens respecting his future promise purely and simply, so that they might not remain too long neutral between two formidable political rivals,—pursuant in a certain way to the Solonian proclamation against neutrality in a sedition, as I have already remarked in a former chapter. He incorporated in the constitution itself the principle of privilegium (to employ the Roman phrase, which signifies, not a peculiar favor granted to any one, but a peculiar inconvenience imposed), yet only under circumstances solemn and well defined, with full notice and discussion beforehand, and by the positive secret vote of a large proportion of the citizens. “No law shall be made against any single citizen, without the same being made against all Athenian citizens; unless it shall so seem good to six thousand citizens voting secretly.”[276] Such was that general principle of the constitution, under which the ostracism was a particular case. Before the vote of ostracism could be taken, a case was to be made out in the senate and the public assembly to justify it. In the sixth prytany of the year, these two bodies debated and determined whether the state of the republic was menacing enough to call for such an exceptional measure.[277] If they decided in the affirmative, a day was named, the agora was railed round, with ten entrances left for the citizens of each tribe, and ten separate casks or vessels for depositing the suffrages, which consisted of a shell, or a potsherd, with the name of the person written on it whom each citizen designed to banish. At the end of the day, the number of votes was summed up, and if six thousand votes were found to have been given against any one person, that person was ostracized; if not, the ceremony ended in nothing.[278] Ten days were allowed to him for settling his affairs, after which he was required to depart from Attica for ten years, but retained his property, and suffered no other penalty.

It was not the maxim at Athens to escape the errors of the people, by calling in the different errors, and the sinister interest besides, of an extra-popular or privileged few; nor was any third course open, since the principles of representative government were not understood, nor indeed conveniently applicable to very small communities. Beyond the judgment of the people—so the Athenians felt—there was no appeal; and their grand study was to surround the delivery of that judgment with the best securities for rectitude and the best preservatives against haste, passion, or private corruption. Whatever measure of good government could not be obtained in that way, could not, in their opinion, be obtained at all. I shall illustrate the Athenian proceedings on this head more fully when I come to speak of the working of their mature democracy: meanwhile, in respect to this grand protection of the nascent democracy,—the vote of ostracism,—it will be found that the securities devised by Kleisthenês, for making the sentence effectual against the really dangerous man, and against no one else, display not less foresight than patriotism. The main object was, to render the voting an expression of deliberate public feeling, as distinguished from mere factious antipathy: the large minimum of votes required, one-fourth of the entire citizen population, went far to insure this effect,—the more so, since each vote, taken as it was in a secret manner, counted unequivocally for the expression of a genuine and independent sentiment, and could neither be coerced nor bought. Then again, Kleisthenês did not permit the process of ostracizing to be opened against any one citizen exclusively. If opened at all, every one without exception was exposed to the sentence; so that the friends of Themistoklês could not invoke it against Aristeidês,[279] nor those of the latter against the former, without exposing their own leader to the same chance of exile. It was not likely to be invoked at all, therefore, until exasperation had proceeded so far as to render both parties insensible to this chance,—the precise index of that growing internecive hostility, which the ostracism prevented from coming to a head. Nor could it even then be ratified, unless a case was shown to convince the more neutral portion of the senate and the ekklesia: moreover, after all, the ekklesia did not itself ostracize, but a future day was named, and the whole body of the citizens were solemnly invited to vote. It was in this way that security was taken not only for making the ostracism effectual in protecting the constitution, but to hinder it from being employed for any other purpose. And we must recollect that it exercised its tutelary influence, not merely on those occasions when it was actually employed, but by the mere knowledge that it might be employed, and by the restraining effect which that knowledge produced on the conduct of the great men. Again, the ostracism, though essentially of an exceptional nature, was yet an exception sanctified and limited by the constitution itself; so that the citizen, in giving his ostracizing vote, did not in any way depart from the constitution or lose his reverence for it. The issue placed before him—“Is there any man whom you think vitally dangerous to the state? if so, whom?”—though vague, was yet raised directly and legally. Had there been no ostracism, it might probably have been raised both indirectly and illegally, on the occasion of some special imputed crime of a suspected political leader, when accused before a court of justice, —a perversion, involving all the mischief of the ostracism, without its protective benefits.

Care was taken to divest the ostracism of all painful consequence except what was inseparable from exile; and this is not one of the least proofs of the wisdom with which it was devised. Most certainly, it never deprived the public of candidates for political influence: and when we consider the small amount of individual evil which it inflicted,—evil too diminished, in the cases of Kimon and Aristeidês, by a reactionary sentiment which augmented their subsequent popularity after return,—two remarks will be quite sufficient to offer in the way of justification. First, it completely produced its intended effect; for the democracy grew up from infancy to manhood without a single attempt to overthrow it by force,[280]—a result, upon which no reflecting contemporary of Kleisthenês could have ventured to calculate. Next, through such tranquil working of the democratical forms, a constitutional morality quite sufficiently complete was produced among the leading Athenians, to enable the people after a certain time to dispense with that exceptional security which the ostracism offered.[281] To the nascent democracy, it was absolutely indispensable; to the growing yet militant democracy, it was salutary; but the full-grown democracy both could and did stand without it. The ostracism passed upon Hyperbolus, about ninety years after Kleisthenês, was the last occasion of its employment. And even this can hardly be considered as a serious instance: it was a trick concerted between two distinguished Athenians (Nikias and Alkibiadês), to turn to their own political account a process already coming to be antiquated. Nor would such a manœuvre have been possible, if the contemporary Athenian citizens had been penetrated with the same, serious feeling of the value of ostracism as a safeguard of democracy, as had been once entertained by their fathers and grandfathers. Between Kleisthenês and Hyperbolus, we hear of about ten different persons as having been banished by ostracism. First of all, Hipparchus of the deme Cholargus, the son of Charmus, a relative of the recently-expelled Peisistratid despots;[282] then Aristeidês, Themistoklês, Kimon, and Thucydidês son of Melêsias, all of them renowned political leaders; also Alkibiadês and Megaklês (the paternal and maternal grandfathers of the distinguished Alkibiadês), and Kallias, belonging to another eminent family at Athens;[283] lastly, Damôn, the preceptor of Periklês in poetry and music, and eminent for his acquisitions in philosophy.[284] In this last case comes out the vulgar side of humanity, aristocratical as well as democratical; for with both, the process of philosophy and the persons of philosophers are wont to be alike unpopular. Even Kleisthenês himself is said to have been ostracized under his own law, and Xanthippus; but both upon authority too weak to trust.[285] Miltiadês was not ostracized at all, but tried and punished for misconduct in his command.

I should hardly have said so much about this memorable and peculiar institution of Kleisthenês, if the erroneous accusations against the Athenian democracy,—of envy, injustice, and ill-treatment of their superior men, had not been greatly founded upon it, and if such criticisms had not passed from ancient times to modern with little examination. In monarchical governments, a pretender to the throne, numbering a certain amount of supporters, is, as a matter of course, excluded from the country. The duke of Bordeaux cannot now reside in France,—nor could Napoleon after 1815,—nor Charles Edward in England during the last century. No man treats this as any extravagant injustice, yet it is the parallel of the ostracism,—with a stronger case in favor of the latter, inasmuch as the change from one regal dynasty to another does not of necessity overthrow all the collateral institutions and securities of the country. Plutarch has affirmed that the ostracism arose from the envy and jealousy inherent in a democracy,[286] and not from justifiable fears,—an observation often repeated, yet not the less demonstrably untrue. Not merely because ostracism so worked as often to increase the influence of that political leader whose rival it removed,—but still more, because, if the fact had been as Plutarch says, this institution would have continued as long as the democracy; whereas it finished with the banishment of Hyperbolus, at a period when the government was more decisively democratical than it had been in the time of Kleisthenês. It was, in truth, a product altogether of fear and insecurity,[287] on the part both of the democracy and its best friends,—fear perfectly well-grounded, and only appearing needless because the precautions taken prevented attack. So soon as the diffusion of a constitutional morality had placed the mass of the citizens above all serious fear of an aggressive usurper the ostracism was discontinued. And doubtless the feeling, that it might safely be dispensed with, must have been strengthened by the long ascendency of Periklês,—by the spectacle of the greatest statesman whom Athens ever produced, acting steadily within the limits of the constitution; as well as by the ill-success of his two opponents, Kimon and Thucydidês,—aided by numerous partisans and by the great comic writers, at a period when comedy was a power in the state such as it has never been before or since,—in their attempts to get him ostracized. They succeeded in fanning up the ordinary antipathy of the citizens towards philosophers, so far as to procure the ostracism of his friend and teacher Damôn: but Periklês himself, to repeat the complaint of his bitter enemy, the comic poet Kratinus,[288] “was out of the reach of the oyster-shell.” If Periklês was not conceived to be dangerous to the constitution, none of his successors were at all likely to be so regarded. Damôn and Hyperbolus were the two last persons ostracized: both of them were cases, and the only cases, of an unequivocal abuse of the institution, because, whatever the grounds of displeasure against them may have been, it is impossible to conceive either of them as menacing to the state,—whereas all the other known sufferers were men of such position and power, that the six or eight thousand citizens who inscribed each name on the shell, or at least a large proportion of them, may well have done so under the most conscientious belief that they were guarding the constitution against real danger. Such a change, in the character of the persons ostracized, plainly evinces that the ostracism had become dissevered from that genuine patriotic prudence which originally rendered it both legitimate and popular. It had served for two generations an inestimable tutelary purpose,—it lived to be twice dishonored,—and then passed, by universal acquiescence, into matter of history.

A process analogous to the ostracism subsisted at Argos,[289] at Syracuse, and in some other Grecian democracies. Aristotle states that it was abused for factious purposes: and at Syracuse, where it was introduced after the expulsion of the Gelonian dynasty, Diodorus affirms that it was so unjustly and profusely applied, as to deter persons of wealth and station from taking any part in public affairs; for which reason it was speedily discontinued. We have no particulars to enable us to appreciate this general statement. But we cannot safely infer that because the ostracism worked on the whole well at Athens, it must necessarily have worked well in other states,—the more so, as we do not know whether it was surrounded with the same precautionary formalities, nor whether it even required the same large minimum of votes to make it effective. This latter guarantee, so valuable in regard to an institution essentially easy to abuse, is not noticed by Diodorus in his brief account of the Petalism,—so the process was denominated at Syracuse.[290]

Such was the first Athenian democracy, engendered as well by the reaction against Hippias and his dynasty as by the memorable partnership, whether spontaneous or compulsory, between Kleisthenês and the unfranchised multitude. It is to be distinguished, both from the mitigated oligarchy established by Solon before, and from the full-grown and symmetrical democracy which prevailed afterwards from the beginning of the Peloponnesian war towards the close of the career of Periklês. It was, indeed, a striking revolution, impressed upon the citizen not less by the sentiments to which it appealed than by the visible change which it made in political and social life. He saw himself marshalled in the ranks of hoplites, alongside of new companions in arms,—he was enrolled in a new register, and his property in a new schedule, in his deme and by his demarch, an officer before unknown,—he found the year distributed afresh, for all legal purposes, into ten parts bearing the name of prytanies, each marked by a solemn and free-spoken ekklesia, at which he had a right to be present,—that ekklesia was convoked and presided by senators called prytanes, members of a senate novel both as to number and distribution,—his political duties were now performed as member of a tribe, designated by a name not before pronounced in common Attic life, connected with one of ten heroes whose statues he now for the first time saw in the agora, and associating him with fellow-tribemen from all parts of Attica. All these and many others were sensible novelties, felt in the daily proceedings of the citizen. But the great novelty of all was, the authentic recognition of the ten new tribes as a sovereign dêmos, or people, apart from all specialties of phratric or gentile origin, with free speech and equal law; retaining no distinction except the four classes of the Solonian property-schedule with their gradations of eligibility. To a considerable proportion of citizens this great novelty was still farther endeared by the fact that it had raised them out of the degraded position of metics and slaves; and to the large majority of all the citizens, it furnished a splendid political idea, profoundly impressive to the Greek mind,—capable of calling forth the most ardent attachment as well as the most devoted sense of active obligation and obedience. We have now to see how their newly-created patriotism manifested itself.