The Historians' History of the World 03

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 Clisthenean constitution, the polemarch still retained a joint right of command along with them—as we are told at the battle of Marathon, where Callimachus the polemarch not only enjoyed an equal vote in the council of war along with the ten strategi, but even occupied the post of honour on the right wing. The ten generals, annually changed, are thus (like the ten tribes) a fruit of the Clisthenean 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 dicasteries or numerous jury-courts, on the other. We may be very sure that these popular dicasteries had not been permitted to meet or to act under the despotism of the Pisistratidæ, 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 ecclesia. 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 Clisthenes, doubtless carried the people into direct action as jurors in the aggregate heliæa, not less than as voters in the ecclesia; 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 panels, for trying particular causes, became gradually more frequent and more systematised: until at length, in the time of Pericles, it was made to carry a small pay, and stood out as one of the most prominent features of Athenian life.

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. From this time forward, the senate of Five Hundred steps far beyond its original duty of preparing matters for the discussion of the ecclesia: 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.