Persian Fire (25 page)

That was the limit of their conspiracy. Harmodius himself was killed on the spot; Aristogiton, although tortured for a few days,, revealed nothing of any broader plot. Yet could Hippias afford to believe that the two assassins had acted on their own? Hipparchus, after all, had been murdered because he had abused his power; and the whisper on the streets was that he had been the victim, not of a crime of passion, but of a heroic blow struck in the cause of freedom. Hippias began to grow paranoid. With the ebbing of his confidence, the shadow-play which he and his family had long orchestrated appeared increasingly a sham. The balance that they had always struck with such delicacy — between the true nature of their regime and the sets which had served to adorn it, between menace and a gracious magnanimity - was fatally upset. Despairing, the bereaved and panicky Hippias began to rely increasingly upon naked terror. Executions, previously carried out in back-rooms, were soon washing the city in blood. Repression bred conspiracy; conspiracy led to further repression. The pretence that Athens was anything other than a police state began to seem a savage joke. Hippias, formerly 'a man who was always easily approachable,'
³⁸
now hunkered himself away among his Scythians and his other foreign mercenaries, as though he were some alien despot, as though barely Athenian at all.

Yet who was there to dispose of him? Heated talk of revolution in the salons of the aristocracy or in the bars of the Ceramicus was all very well — but someone had to take a lead. All eyes turned to Cleisthenes, who duly materialised, jackal-like as ever, on the northern frontier of Attica, barely a year after Hipparchus' death. Presented with the opportunity to throw out Hippias, however, the Athenians signally failed to take it. Resentful of the tyranny though they had become, they were hardly more enthusiastic about restoring the Alcmaeonids to power. Cleisthenes, once his invasion force had been annihilated by Hippias' mercenaries, had no choice but to slink back across the border. Behind him, on the battlefield, he left the corpses of those few Athenians who had dared to support him. 'Good warriors, and nobly born — they showed the blood that flowed in their veins.'
³⁹
For the Athenians, it appeared, a grim truth had been revealed: the only alternative to slavery was banishment or death.

Not that the irrepressible Cleisthenes himself had given up. Wallowing in self-doubt was hardly the Alcmaeonid way. Even as he licked his wounds, the man who remained the tyranny's most dangerous adversary was scouting around for fresh allies. Cleisthenes knew that he was far from the only man who wished to see Hippias fall. A second quality schemer, positively Alcmaeonid in his eye for the main chance, and far exceeding the Alcmaeonids in the resources available to him, also had an interest in destabilising Athens. Indeed, King Cleomenes of Sparta, back in 519
bc
: during his first expedition north of the Isthmus, had already had a stab at it. On that occasion the Plataeans, citizens of a small city ten miles south of Thebes, had approached him for support against their overweening neighbour; and Cleomenes, with malevolent cunning, had advised them to turn for help instead to Athens. Unable to resist this flattering appeal, the brother-tyrants had duly marched to the Plataeans' defence and won an overwhelming victory: a result which, although gaining for the Athenians the undying loyalty of little Plataea, had, of course, dealt a death-blow to their friendship with the powerful Thebans. Since this had been a mainstay of Pisistratid foreign policy since at least the time of their father's second exile, the whole episode could be reckoned a major blunder. Cleomenes had been left rubbing his hands in glee.

But could Cleisthenes, putting out feelers six years later, persuade the Spartan king to intervene openly against Hippias? It might have appeared a quixotic hope. The Pisistratids, despite their marriage alliance to Argos, had been careful to hedge their bets and stay on the good side of Sparta, too — so much so that Hippias was officially ranked as 'a friend of the Spartan people'. Before approaching their king, however, Cleisthenes would surely have done some homework on his man. He would have known that Cleomenes, with his proven enthusiasm for meddling in the business of cities beyond the Peloponnese, was hardly the model of a hidebound Spartan king. A politician with Cleisthenes' silver tongue would have been confident of convincing Cleomenes of what the latter was no doubt inclined to believe anyway: that Hippias, with his megalomaniacal building projects and his alliance with Argos, was a menace to Spartan interests. Yet Cleomenes, no matter how unorthodox in his approach to international relations, could hardly be expected to launch an unprovoked attack against a man who was, after all, 'a friend of the Spartan people' — not without some trumped-up justification, at the very least. Here too, however, the ever-resourceful Cleisthenes was able to oblige. Not for nothing had the Alcmaeonids made themselves the favourites of Delphi - even to the extent of paying for lavish refurbishments after the great fire of 548
bc
. Now, after decades of devoted patronage, it was payback time. Spartans who consulted the oracle received a single, invariable reply. No matter what questions they put to Apollo, the same answer always came back — 'it was their duty to set Athens free'.
⁴⁰
When this startling news was reported back to Sparta, it was greeted with consternation. Perhaps only Cleomenes, tipped off by Cleisthenes as he must have been, failed to share in the general perplexity and alarm.

Not that there could be any question, for a people as devout as the Spartans, of ignoring Apollo's command, no matter how bemused by it they might be. 'After all, while it was perfectly true that the Pisistratids were good friends of theirs, what were human ties when set against the orders of a god?"" The first expedition sent against Athens — perhaps reflecting the Spartans' continued unease at the illegality of what they were doing — was low key and undermanned, and Hippias was able to repel it easily. The second, with their prestige now directly at stake, was overwhelming. In the summer of 510
bc
, a Spartan army led by Cleomenes himself advanced from the Isthmus and crossed into Attica. This time, almost disdainfully, it swatted aside Hippias' mercenaries. Scuttling back into Athens, the tyrant holed himself up with his family on the Acropolis, where Cleomenes promptly barricaded him, blocking off every bolt-hole with such an attention to detail that when Hippias sought to smuggle out his children to safety, they dropped straight into the Spartans' hands. Their father, bargaining desperately for their lives, was issued a stern ultimatum: he must leave Attica at once. Stunned by the abruptness of his fall, Hippias found himself with little choice but to accept these bitter terms. His only consolation as he left the city he had ruled for so long would have been to reflect that exile, for any tyrant, could be considered something of an occupational hazard — and that, as his father had amply demonstrated, there was nothing to stop him from plotting his return. In the short term, however, the tyranny was finished. Athens, dramatically, unexpectedly, was free.

But what did her freedom mean? On that score, the two men whose manoeuvrings had done most to restore it to her held ominously contrasting views. Cleisthenes, no matter what he might have promised Cleomenes while in exile, had not the slightest intention of seeing his city become a client-state of Sparta. Cleomenes himself, meanwhile, having risked Spartan lives in the cause of a thoroughly illegal war, was looking for precisely such a return on his investment. Even if he could not have a regime that was actively subservient, he wanted, at the very least, an Athens so racked by factionalism that she would cease to function as a threat to Sparta. Soon enough, the compact between the two conspirators began to break down. In the shadow-boxing that followed, the advantage appeared to be all Cleomenes'. Certainly, Eupatrid suspicions of Cleisthenes remained as dark as ever, and there were any number of aristocrats, now that the dead hand of the tyranny had been removed, keen to get back to the good old days of ganging up against the Alcmaeonids. Opposition to Cleisthenes began to gravitate around a rival nobleman by the name of Isagoras, 'a former friend of the tyrants'
⁴²
— and to such effect that he was elected in 508
bc
to the archonship. Cleomenes, by now openly aligned against his former partner, let it be known from Sparta that he thoroughly approved. So vital had Isagoras regarded the backing of the Spartan king, and so desperately had he craved it, that it was rumoured he had gone so far as to pimp Cleomenes his wife.

Cleisthenes, though he had stooped to many low tricks in his time, had never sunk quite as low as that. For all his mastery of scam and spin, he was much more than the grasping opportunist of his enemies' propaganda. Resolute in his determination not to see Athens sunk to the status of a Spartan client-state, he could also recognise that Isagoras and his allies were fighting a war that had already had its day. Few Athenians might have recognised it, but the character of their city had changed for ever. Authority, under the tyrants, had become a thing of shadow, melted from the grip of the elite who had once hugged it so tightly to themselves. Now that the tyranny itself was gone, it was difficult to say where precisely power resided. With those few families, the Alcmaeonids themselves, perhaps, or the Philaids, who still had a personal base? Perhaps, but Cleisthenes' own experiences since his return to Athens had demonstrated that even the very grandest Eupatrids, weakened by exile or by the humiliations of collaboration, had been perilously leeched of their prestige. Menaced by Isagoras, he chose to turn for support not, as was traditional for one of his background, to other factions among the elite, to those of wealth and breeding, but to a wholly original source. Addressing an assembly of the citizens, Cleisthenes proposed what was in effect a revolution.
⁴³
If the people, as Hippias, as Pisistratus, as even Solon had always claimed, were truly sovereign, very well then — let them have authority over the city to match. Let them debate policy, and vote on it, and implement it, without regard to qualifications of class or wealth. Let power —
kratos
— be invested in the
demos.
Let Athens, in short, become a
demokratia.

A programme so startling, so baldly radical, that it was wholly without precedent. His opponents, caught off balance, responded with howls of rage and disbelief. While Cleisthenes' proposals, unsurprisingly, 'won him the wholehearted backing of the people',
^4S
they appeared to Isagoras and his followers a scam of quite terrifying irresponsibility, reckless and cynical even by the standards of past Alcmaeonid manoeuvring. Yet, if anything, the truth was even more unsettling for the aristocracy. The measures Cleisthenes was putting forward, in the sweep of their ambition, and in the brilliance of their design, did not have the character of a cornered gambler's makeshift throw. Far from it: they showed every sign of having been most carefully worked out. Cleisthenes would have had no lack of opportunity, in the bitterness of his exile, to reflect upon how all the ambitions of the nobility, all the pretensions of his own and of the other Eupatrid clans had led only to decades of internal feuding and to the indignities of a tyranny. Athens was sick — so much everyone agreed. What possible hope, then, for a cure? Only one, Cleisthenes and his associates appear to have decided. To break the mould; to harness the ambitions not only of the elite but of all the Athenian people; to create, from their energy, a future for Athens that would at last match the full measure of her potential. A great, a momentous, a breath-taking gamble — and on it Cleisthenes appeared willing to stake everything.

Except that, suddenly, his nerve failed him. In the early summer of 507 lie, a herald arrived from Sparta, and demanded, citing the ancient curse, the expulsion of the Alcmaeonids. Clearly, in the game of cat and mouse between the two former allies, Cleomenes still had plenty of moves to make. Cleisthenes, as though dreading what might come next, promptly turned tail and fled. Soon afterwards, Cleomenes himself, accompanied by a small bodyguard of soldiers, came breezing into town. Briskly, he ordered a further purging of anti-Spartan elements, seven hundred families in all. Then, swaggering up to the Acropolis, he settled down with Isagoras to dictate a new constitutional order. Naturally, there was to be no place in it for any nonsense about democracy. Just as naturally, Isagoras, who had already loaned his wife to Cleomenes, was now obliged to pimp Athens herself to Sparta.

As the two men, king and quisling, deliberated, however, there came from the streets far below them an ominous and violent sound: that of rioting. Peering down from the battlements, Cleomenes saw angry crowds massing before the gates of the Acropolis, blockading him and his soldiers on the summit. To put it mildly, this was unexpected. Who could possibly be directing the riot? Cleisthenes was in exile. His associates had also been expelled. Slowly, as the hours passed, the unpalatable truth dawned. The Athenian people themselves, infuriated by Cleomenes' presumptions and Isagoras' treachery, had risen spontaneously in defence of their promised freedoms — nor did they appear in any mood to be placated. For two days the blockade was maintained. By the third, Cleomenes, 'hungry, filthy, and stubble-chinned',
⁴⁶
had had enough. A truce was arranged; the Spartans, humiliatingly, were obliged to accept safe conduct to the border; Isagoras, somehow escaping the city too, managed to slip away into exile. His fellow collaborators, meanwhile, were rounded up and put to death. Democracy, having staked its future amid the smoke and bloodshed of revolution, had endured the first attempt to snuff it out.