The First Clash (12 page)

Despite Herodotus’s claims about the effects democracy had on Athens’s military capability, this superiority was not, at the time, apparent to the people of Attica.
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Athens had only recently become a trading nation, and although by the time of Marathon it was far wealthier than a generation before, it was still a distant way from the riches that would later propel it to greatness. No one in Greece, probably including the Athenians, thought Athens possessed the wealth necessary to stand up to the might of Persia. After all, the Greek city-states of Ionia had all been rich trading centers, and each had been battered into submission by Persia in the years just preceding the Battle of Marathon. As for the benefits of democracy, many Ionic cities that had also started down that road had seen their free hoplites cut down before the unbeatable hordes of the Persian despot. Truth be told, free-trading democratic states had not fared well in their conflicts with the centralized, despotic Persian super-state. On the Plain of Marathon, Athens would make democracy’s last stand.

That this lot fell to Athens could not have been predicted from the
city’s early history. For even in Athens, democratic institutions did not easily take root. Instead, they were the result of a bloody massacre that was followed by decades of civil strife, as Athens’s great noble clans vied for ultimate power. This small nobility soon transformed itself into an established aristocracy who jointly controlled the region.

In 632 BC, an Athenian noble and Olympic hero, Cylon, supported by his father-in-law Theagenes (tyrant of Megara), seized Athens’s Acropolis and declared a tyranny.
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Unfortunately for his prospects, Cylon had failed to prepare the ground for revolution, and the common people, staying loyal to the local aristocracy, failed to rise up and join him. Moreover, the fact that the Athenians could see foreign soldiers from hated Megara on the Acropolis sapped any sympathy the mob may have had for Cylon’s cause.

The government, under the direction of leading members of the Alcmaeonidae clan—one of Athens’s noble families—reacted vigorously and besieged Cylon and his followers. Cylon, with his brother, managed to escape to Megara, but his followers remained trapped on the Acropolis and agreed to surrender only on the condition their lives would be spared. However, when they descended from the Acropolis, the rival Alcmaeonidae, led by Megacles, were waiting. The Alcmaeonidae slaughtered without mercy all of Cylon’s defenseless supporters. It can probably be assumed that the Alcmaeonidae had an ongoing feud with Cylon’s clan that in their eyes justified their brutality. However, for the superstitious Attic peasants, this mass murder of unarmed men made the Alcmaeonidae “odious to men” and tainted the clan with perpetual blood guilt. Although the Alcmaeonidae were powerful enough to stave off retribution for their act for thirty years, they were eventually tried by an assembly of three hundred nobles. As a result, the Alcmaeonidae were condemned and cast into perpetual exile. Moreover, every Alcmaeonidae who died between the murderous act and the passing of this sentence was exhumed and his bones cast beyond the boundaries of Attica. From this point on, the family was judged accursed, and for the next hundred years or more, their political enemies would wield this stain with tremendous effectiveness.

In the immediate wake of the massacre of Cylon’s followers, Athens found itself at war with Megara, while the continual feuding among its own noble families threatened to destroy Athenian society. In an attempt to restore civil order, Athens in 621 BC gave one of its citizens, Draco, the power to draft a code of laws to be accepted by all. Although history has been left barely a trace of the original code, its penalties were judged so severe
by later generations that a new word was created for punishments that appear to far exceed the crime: draconian. However, Draco’s law code was not without useful effect. Foremost among its achievements was that it ended or at least greatly curtailed the blood feuds that kept Athens in a state of perpetual multiparty civil war. In the future, these interclan rivalries would be fought out in the political arena. This political competition could and often did turn violent, but the outbreaks became episodic rather than endemic.

For a time after the installation of Draco’s code, Athens entered into a period of prosperity. Peace was eventually made with Megara, and for the first time Athens began to expand its interests and influence in the greater world. This was felt primarily in its expeditions to the Black Sea region, where there was always a surplus of purchasable grain to feed Attica’s growing population. This trade and the natural expansion of its interests led Athens into its first distant war, with the city-state of Lesbos over control of the Dardanelles. However, the strains of this war coupled with the growing avarice of the noble families placed a fiscal strain on Athens that its primitive economic institutions could not yet stand.

As the fiscal requirements for war grew, the nobles took advantage of their political power to disenfranchise most of the population of Attica through the use of stringent debt laws. Unfortunately for the oppressed peasant class, Draco’s constitutional formula left them few avenues to redress their grievances. As the poor and middle class had no legal power to question the actions of the noble families, the air became rife with talk of revolution. As Aristotle noted, “The cruelest and bitterest grievance of the many against the existing order was their slavery. But they were also discontented with all else. For at this time the mass of the people had a share in almost nothing.”
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What the moment demanded was a man who could lead and take bold measures to ensure just laws that could end a social crisis that was verging on all-out civil war.
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As often happens in history, a man great enough to meet the crisis of his time arose: Solon, whose name is still synonymous with lawgiver.

Solon was born in Athens in 638 BC and was a distinguished member of the Athenian nobility. He began his rise to power as a result of his advocacy of renewed war with Megara. Sometime before 595 BC, Megara regained control of the island of Salamis, which Athens had won in its earlier war with Megara. From Salamis, the Megarians were in a position to throttle the expansion of Athenian trade and forever keep it locked among the second-rate cities of Greece. It was not, however, from a lack
of Athenian exertion that Megara still held Salamis. In fact, Athens had strained mightily to retake the island. However, by 595 BC it had bled itself white in the process, and the war-weary city had made it a crime punishable by death for anyone to publicly advocate a continuation of the war.

Supposedly, Solon noted that many of Athens’s young men wished to continue the war but remained silent for fear of punishment. Solon decided to make use of this current of discontent to push for a renewal of the Megarian war. Not trusting that power and influence were enough to protect him, Solon took the extra precaution of having family members put it about that he had gone mad. He then entered the Agora (marketplace) and read a stirring poem of his own composition, concluding with:
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The poem had such an effect that Solon was forgiven his crime, the law against advocating war was repealed, and the war with Megara was renewed with “greater vigor than ever before.”
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The military effort was led by a young noble and friend of Solon, Pisistratus, who hailed from the hill country outside the Plain of Athens. Under his command the Athenian army marched directly for Megara, which appeared to be suffering from its own internal dissension. After a hard fight, the Athenians captured Megara’s port, Nisaea, and cut off that city from the outside world. With this prize in hand, Pisistratus agreed to let Sparta arbitrate the dispute. Sparta, much to Athens’s satisfaction, decided that Salamis would go to Athens and that Nisaea would be returned to Megara. This time the annexation of Salamis was permanent, and Pisistratus became the hero of the hour.
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With the conclusion of the Megarian war, Solon was riding a tide of popularity and was elected archon in 594 BC and given unlimited authority to act as he saw fit for the benefit of the state. Solon used his powers to remake Athenian society and institutions. Among his first acts was the creation of nine archons to administer Athens on a daily basis. These archons were appointed by the Areopagus (a collection of former archons) on the basis of their noble birth and wealth. Solon also created an assembly of Athenian citizens, the Ecclesia, which had a voice in the biggest decisions of the day but excluded the poorest and most numerous classes of
Athenian society, the
thetes
. Solon also undertook to establish a new economic order in Attica. In this, he was more successful than in his constitutional reforms. Much of the debt that was forcing the peasant class into bondage was relieved, new coinage was issued, and Athens began its first major moves away from an agriculture-dominated economy to one based on trade and commercial affairs.

When he was done, Solon left Athens, and according to Herodotus, he bound the city to maintain all of his reforms for ten years. They in fact lasted only about four years before the old societal rifts began to reassert themselves.
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When Solon eventually returned to Athens, he found the city as fractious as ever. He spent his final years trying to settle disputes and relieve civil dissension but met with little success. However, although Solon’s attempts at reform failed spectacularly in the short term, they did establish the system out of which eventually grew the institutions of democracy. It was left to Pisistratus, the military hero of the Megarian war, to impose order.
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We pick up the story of Athens in 562 BC. In the East, Croesus was about to mount the throne of Lydia, and Cyrus was still three years away from being made king of a small Persian tribe. Taking advantage of the civil disorder in the city, Pisistratus resolved to become tyrant of Athens. To do this, he required a strong base of political support, which was not readily available. Prior to his rise, and in the wake of Draco’s and Solon’s reforms, Athenian politics was dominated by two parties: the Party of the Coast and the Party of the Plains. As Pisistratus was unable to dominate either of these two parties, he created a third party, the Party of the Hills. For anyone not steeped in Athenian constitutional history, following developments in Athens from this point leads to a hopeless morass. The following table describes the three parties, their relationships to the great clans, and their aims.

Pisistratus built his party from the poor and disenfranchised of Athenian society. They were to prove remarkably loyal, and his political base stood with him both in success and even during his times of failure and exile.
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With the full support of his Party of the Hills, which made up for a lack of money with numbers, Pisistratus made his bid for ultimate power. After staging an attempt on his life, he appeared in the Agora, beaten and wounded, claiming that he had been set upon by his enemies and just barely escaped being murdered. After he told the assembly, which was packed with the city’s poor and the men of the hills, that he was targeted because he spoke up for their rights, they voted him a personal bodyguard of fifty armed men. Possessing the only permanently organized armed body in the state, in 560 BC Pisistratus seized the Acropolis and
with it the Athenian treasury.
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As the majority of the people supported him, the Parties of the Coast and Plains, already at each other’s throats, could not find common cause to resist the power grab.

Pisistratus was now master of the state. It took five years before the other two parties were able to settle their differences sufficiently to use their combined resources to force him from power and into exile. However, the anti-Pisistratus coalition quickly collapsed again. Megacles, leader of the Party of the Coast, quarreled with his Plains allies and possibly even with his own party. As a counterweight, he reached out to Pisistratus and offered to assist his return to power if Pisistratus agreed to marry his daughter and unite the two families. Pisistratus agreed to the terms and began preparations for a suitable entry into Athens. Herodotus relates a legend that his supporters found a woman of unsurpassed beauty and dressed her up as the goddess Athena. Supposedly, the common folk were deceived when a herald went ahead of a gilded chariot bearing Pisistratus and the young lady, announcing that the goddess Athena herself was returning the tyrant to power.