Cleisthenes and democracy

The story

After the tyrant

To understand Cleisthenes' achievement we must go back to Athens in the years when tyrants ruled. A tyrant, for the Greeks, was someone who had taken power by force, without being elected. After Pisistratus, Athens had been governed by his sons, the Pisistratids. In 511 or 510 BC a group of nobles, led by the powerful Alcmaeonid family, managed to drive them out with the help of the Spartan army commanded by King Cleomenes I. Cleisthenes, an Alcmaeonid who had been sent into exile, was able to return to Athens.

The regained freedom, however, did not bring peace at once. Two nobles competed for command: Isagoras, backed by the aristocrats, and Cleisthenes himself, who sought the support of the people. Isagoras asked Sparta for help again and Cleisthenes had to leave once more. But when Isagoras wanted to rule with only a few, the Athenians rose up, forced him to leave the city and called Cleisthenes back. This is the moment when you can see that the people no longer wanted to be commanded by a small group of families.

A reform that started from the tribes

Around 508–507 BC Cleisthenes carried out his great reform. The problem was this: the noble families had enormous power, also thanks to the old division of the citizens into four tribes based on birth. Cleisthenes had a simple and revolutionary idea: change the map. He divided Attica, the territory of Athens, into three large zones: the city, the coast and the inland. Each zone was split into ten groups of villages and neighbourhoods, called trittyes. The demes, that is the individual villages and neighbourhoods, became the basic unit: every citizen was registered in his deme, and this membership passed to his sons. In place of the father's name, the name of the deme began to be used in documents.

Then came the cleverest step. The new tribes were ten, and each included three trittyes, one from each zone. The trittyes did not have to be next to one another: a tribe could therefore contain people from the city, the coast and the countryside, even tens of kilometres apart. In this way no tribe was dominated by a powerful family, because each group was a mosaic of people with different interests. Each tribe was given the name of a local hero, chosen with the help of the Pythia, the priestess of Delphi, from a list of a hundred names.

How the new Athens worked

The reform changed the institutions too. Solon's council of the Four Hundred was replaced by one of Five Hundred members, the Boule: fifty from each tribe, chosen by lot. Lots were used, and not elections, because it was thought they guaranteed impartiality. Each tribe, in turn, led the council for a tenth of the year, and every day a different citizen presided over it. The Boule prepared proposals for laws, supervised the magistrates and dealt with everyday business.

Important decisions belonged to the assembly of the people, the ecclesia, open to all adult male citizens, which met several times a month and voted on laws, elected magistrates, and decided on war and peace. The ten strategoi, that is the generals, were elected and not chosen by lot, because a war cannot be left to chance. The people's courts, too, were made up of jurors chosen by lot.

Ostracism

According to tradition, a particular invention is linked to Cleisthenes' reform: ostracism. Once a year the assembly could decide to send into exile for ten years a citizen considered dangerous to democracy. Each person wrote the name on a potsherd, called an “ostrakon” (from which our “ostracism” comes). For the vote to be valid at least six thousand voters had to be present. The exile did not lose his property and after ten years could return. It was first used in 487 BC. It was meant to protect the city from anyone who wanted to become a tyrant, but over time it was also used as a weapon in struggles between factions.

Who was left out

We call the system that arose “democracy”, but we must remember its limits. Only adult men born in Athens took part in political life. Women, slaves and foreigners were excluded. For Cleisthenes the key word was “isonomia”, that is “equality before the law”: all citizens were to have the same rights. The word “democracy” came later. A few decades later, with the reforms of Ephialtes (462 BC) and Pericles, Athenian democracy grew even broader: Cleisthenes' system had been a stage, not a point of arrival.