And so it proved. No more foreign travels for Pisistratus. With a silky ruthlessness that showed he had nothing left to learn now from the exiled Alcmaeonids, he alternately menaced and lulled his fellow Eupatrids into an unprecedented docility. The children of prominent rivals were packed off as hostages to the Aegean island of Naxos. Slaves from the steppes of Scythia, a savage wilderness far to the north of Greece, appeared suddenly on patrol in the streets, an alarming sight for any citizen, armed as the police squads were with bows and arrows, and wearing outlandish pointed caps. Competitive building on the Acropolis, now that there was only the one show in town, slowly ground to a halt. Yet Pisistratus, even as he kept the city's richest pickings for himself, was careful also to throw his rivals the occasional juicy scrap: a magistracy, perhaps, or an overseas command.
Even the grandest were content to accept his patronage. Miltiades, for instance, head of the Philaids, was given permission to lead an expedition across the Aegean to the Hellespont, the narrow strait which divides Asia from Europe, and is known today as the Dardanelles. Miltiades, relieved to be able to spread his wings, enthusiastically seized his chance. Arriving in the Hellespont, he landed on the Chersonese, the thin peninsula which forms the European bank of the strait, and from which access to the Black Sea, and its corn-gold shores, could easily be controlled. There he threw himself into a brisk war of pacification, not only against the natives, but against any Greek colonists already established there who might presume to stand in his way. Then, with his authority firmly established over the whole peninsula, he settled down, with Pisistratus' blessing, to establish a tyranny of his own. This left everyone — the hapless victims of his campaigns aside, of course — a winner. Certainly, no news could have been better designed to gladden Athenian hearts. Attica, with its thin soil and booming population, had long since outgrown self-sufficiency, and the dread of starvation, even as Athens prospered, was never far away. To Pisistratus, the man who could boast of having sent Miltiades to the Chersonese, and thereby securing it for the Athenian people, immense gratitude was naturally due. The tyrant himself — who had succeeded in keeping his fellow citizens in bread, secured a vital trade route for Athenian business and disposed of a potentially dangerous rival, all with one deft move — could reflect with satisfaction on a job well done.
This killing of multiple birds with a single, well-directed stone was a classic Pisistratid throw. Why, after all, rest content with neutralising the Eupatrids when there were businessmen, potters and farmers to woo as well? Solon, years previously, had dared to ask an identical question — but he had shrunk in horror from the answer. 'Only hand another man the goad I was given,' he had warned with grim self-satisfaction, 'someone unscrupulous and on the make, and you will see how he lets the mob run wild.'
30
Solon had spoken with the moral authority of a man who had spurned the temptations of tyranny; but Pisistratus, despite having whole-heartedly surrendered to them, could claim with some justification that he was only following his old lover's middle way. If his manipulation of aristocratic rivals owed much to a path already blazed by the Alcmaeonids, then he was, in his concern for the
demos,
just as obviously drawing on the example of Solon himself. This was why, autocrat though Pisistratus undoubtedly was, his scrupulous show of respect for the Assembly — like a citizen rather than a tyrant',
31
observers said — was more than mere spin. Not for him the nose-wrinkling of his fellow Eupatrids as they deigned to curry favour with stinking labourers or tradesmen. Pisistratus actively courted popular enthusiasm for his regime. He would tirelessly tour the countryside, pressing the flesh of the humblest fieldhands, bringing justice to the remotest croft, 'so that those with complaints would not have to travel all the way to Athens, and get behind with their business'.
32
Meanwhile, back in the city itself, builders were set to work on the construction of a spectacular new square at the foot of the Acropolis, one that would soon sound to fresh water, bubbling from nine fountains, and gleam with the brilliance of freshly chiselled marble. How could any Athenian, gawping at such unexampled scenes, have any doubts about the tyrant's greatness or his beneficence? Athens truly seemed to have entered 'a golden age'.
33
There was certainly little enthusiasm for any talk of liberty. In the spring of 527
bc
, when Pisistratus finally passed away peacefully in his own bed, his two sons, Hippias and Hipparchus, succeeded without challenge to his nineteen-year reign of peace. An ambassador of the Persian king, should one have been sent to attend to the business of so remote and obscure a city, would have had no difficulty in identifying the form of government that appeared to prevail in Athens — and to be sure, in the character of the two brothers' reign there was indeed a whiff of monarchy. Their tastes, to a degree exceptional even by the standards of their father, ran to the monumental. Any citizen who doubted that had only to look to the south-east of Athens, yet another scene of hammering and chiselling, where the Pisistratids, not content with the on-going beautification of their father's magnificent square, had embarked upon an even more ambitious showcase: a temple to Zeus so breathtakingly vast that philosophers, goggling at the site centuries later, would compare it to the pyramids.
But Hippias and Hipparchus were no pharaohs. Showy though their building projects were, they actually held no formal rank within the city at all. Just as the site on which the great columns of their temple were being erected was an ancient one, long sacred to Zeus, so the Pisistratids themselves, confronted by the natural conservatism of their fellow citizens, had felt it best to root their authority in the subsoil of tradition. It was one thing for them to
indulge in the
enthusiasm for architecture that had always been expected of the upwardly mobile Eupatrid, but it was quite another to flaunt the basis and true character of their power. If rivals proved obdurate, they were best murdered on the quiet. What went on behind closed doors, in darkened cellars, could hardly be boasted of in public. The Pisistratids had to veil as well as publicise their tyranny.
Decorously, therefore, they concealed the nakedness of their supremacy behind the veil of Solon's constitution. Candidates from families other than the Pisistratids continued to be permitted to run for the archonship. Most, of course, were the tyrants' placemen — most, but by no means all. Two, in particular, would have leapt out at anybody scanning a list of the city's archons. One of these, startlingly, was a Miltiades: not the adventurer who had been a contemporary of Pisistratus, but his nephew, recently emerged as head of the Philaids, and would-be tyrant of the Chersonese himself. Just above him was an even bigger jaw-dropper: an Alcmaeonid, no less, one Cleisthenes, restored both to Athens and to her highest office by the favour of the tyrants. Who could doubt, seeing the former exile on the archon list, the legitimacy of the regime that had put him there? Who doubt, when even the most implacable enemy of the tyranny appeared content to adorn it, that the brothers were there to stay?
Yet it was possible to interpret the return of Cleisthenes in a very different light. Could the Alcmaeonids, those inveterate back-stabbers, really have buried the hatchet? To rely upon their good faith was certainly a gamble. Sure enough, soon after Cleisthenes had served his term of office, he overplayed his hand and was forced back into exile.
34
This could be viewed as a victory for the Pisistratids — but it was a peculiarly perilous one. The source of their legitimacy, after all, was their ability to keep peace and public order. Descend to faction-fighting and their grip on power would start to slip. While they could hardly permit popular unrest, neither, awkwardly, could they risk indulging in too much of the repression that might stem it. Seen in such a light, even the temple of Zeus might appear less a monument to their self-confidence than a colossal bluff.
And in truth, such illusions were the hallmark of the regime. Look one way, and Athens might indeed appear a monarchy. Look another and something very different. The citizen inspecting the archon list, if he turned eastwards, would see, along the margin of the open space, the glint of money changing hands, and hear the clamour of business — for the square, that imperious exercise in Pisistratid self-promotion, was already being colonised by commerce. Merchants had grown fat on the tyranny. Silver weighed heavy on counting-tables all over the city, coins standardised, it seems likely, by the Pisistratids themselves, stamped on one side with Athena and on the other with her sacred owl — a currency so pure that already it had come to rank among the strongest of any city's. But if it had served to make the rich more of a force to be reckoned with than ever, it had also raised the profile of those on whom big business depended, whether the potters of the Ceramicus or the farmers who supplied the olive-presses. Hippias and Hipparchus, like their father, courted them all. Every class in Athens was wooed and flattered somehow. Just as the archons were encouraged to pretend that the constitution was something more than a glorified sham, so the people were still cast as citizens who were sovereign, earth-born, free. Potters and farmers, told that often enough, might even end up believing it. Such a delusion naturally served the tyrants' own purposes well. Actors rarely appear more authentic than when convinced of the reality of their parts.
Of the many memorials raised by the tyranny to itself, then, perhaps the most fitting was not the temple of Zeus, nor any other
grand projet,
but rather an addiction among the Athenians to the wearing of masks, the mouthing of scripts and the playing of roles. Later generations, looking back to the mysterious birth of tragedy, would have no hesitation in attributing to the tyrants' original patronage a prestigious new festival, the City Dionysia, which had as its centrepiece a contest between rival tragedians — nor in imagining what the motive for such sponsorship might have been. After all, 'only allow ourselves to praise and honour make-believe,' as Solon was said to have warned, 'and the next thing will be to find it creeping into the very business of state.'
35
Which was, of course, for the Pisistratids, precisely the appeal.
Yet they too, lost in a hall of mirrors of their own making, appear sometimes to have longed for a guiding hand. How best to find one in a city in which the boundaries between fantasy and fact, propaganda and truth, had grown so blurred was naturally a challenge. Fearful of over-reliance on any human agency, the two brothers opted instead to put their faith in the supernatural. Hippias, it was said, 'had a deeper understanding of oracles than any other man living',
36
and together with his brother sponsored a vast archive of prophecies, which they hoarded lovingly on the Acropolis. When Hipparchus discovered that the archivist, an intimate of his by the name of Onomacritus, had been doctoring them, the tyrant was so upset that he banished his friend on the spot. Intelligence, after all, was only ever as good as its source. Bearing this in mind, the two brothers placed a particular reliance upon their own dreams — and to such effect that they ruled their city without challenge for thirteen years.
Then, one blazing night in the summer of 514
bc,
on the eve of the Great Panathenaea, Hipparchus had a vision that he failed to understand. A young and very beautiful man spoke to him from beside his bed, warning him in the urgent and cryptic manner of dreams that crimes must always be paid for. Hipparchus, waking with a jolt, would surely have devoted himself to identifying the offence he might have committed and making amends — but it was the morning of the Great Panathenaea and he did not have the time. Instead, leaving his home, he hurried across his father's square, heading for the Ceramicus, where his brother was organising the great procession that would soon be departing for the Acropolis. As he passed a temple on the edge of the square, Hipparchus saw two men he recognised pushing their way towards him. Perhaps then, too late, he made sudden sense of his dream. For the two men were coming to murder him. One, Harmodius, was the handsomest man in Athens, 'in the full splendour of his youth',
37
while the other, Aristogiton, was his lover — and Hipparchus, who had an aesthete's eye for beauty, had attempted to split the couple for his own predatory ends, and thereby mortally offended them both. Dreading the power of the tyrant, and knowing that they had no other recourse, the two lovers had been biding their time, waiting until a festival such as the Panathenaea, at which everyone wore swords, when they would have their chance. Now, with Hipparchus before them, and with his bodyguards distracted by the crowds, they cut him down.