The Historians' History of the World 03

Thus fell the Pisistratid dynasty in 510 B.C., fifty years after the first usurpation of its founder. It was put down through the aid of foreigners, and those foreigners, too, wishing well to it in their hearts, though hostile from a mistaken feeling of divine injunction. Yet both the circumstances of its fall, and the course of events which followed, conspire to show that it possessed few attached friends in the country, and that the expulsion of Hippias was welcomed unanimously by the vast majority of Athenians. His family and chief partisans would accompany him into exile,—probably as a matter of course, without requiring any formal sentence of condemnation; and an altar was erected in the Acropolis, with a column hard by, commemorating both the past iniquity of the dethroned dynasty, and the names of all its members.

[510-507 B.C.]

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 Cleomenes 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 that the Pisistratidæ 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, Clisthenes the Alcmæonid, 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, Clisthenes 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.” His partnership with the people gave birth to the Athenian democracy: it was a real and important revolution.

GROTE’S ESTIMATE OF CLISTHENES THE REFORMER

[507 B.C.]