Persian Fire (26 page)

Brought the news, Cleisthenes promptly hurried back in triumph. The victory, however, as everyone knew, was hardly his alone. Even his most diehard opponents now had to accept that there could be no retreating from the reform programme he had promised the Athenian people: for it was, after they had stormed the Acropolis and defeated Cleomenes, their simple due. Indeed, with the lynching of Isagoras' followers still fresh in everybody's mind, it had become possible even for the upper classes to feel a certain sense of relief that Cleisthenes was back on the scene. Better him and his carefully planned package of reforms than blood flowing in the streets, and Eupatrid corpses strung up on the Acropolis, rotting in the heat.

So it was that midway through that momentous year of 507
bc
, an Alcmaeonid relative of Cleisthenes was able to take over smoothly from Isagoras as archon and resume the transformation of Athens into a state like no other in history. While
'eunomia'
— good governance — had been the watchword of previous Greek reformers, from Lycurgus to Solon, that of Cleisthenes and his associates was subtly, and yet radically, different:
'isonomia
— equality. Equality before the law, equality of participation in the running of the state: this, henceforward, was to be the Athenian ideal. True, some citizens remained much more equal than others: it remained the case, for instance, that only the upper classes could run for high office. Nevertheless, although certain relics of the old order had been preserved from the democratic tide, many more were soon to lie submerged beneath it for ever: Solon, for one, would barely have recognised the flood scene. Athens had become a city in which any citizen, no matter how poor or uneducated, was guaranteed freedom of public speech;'
¹⁷
in which policy was no longer debated in the closed and gilded salons of the aristocracy, but openly, in the Assembly, before 'carpenter, blacksmith or cobbler, merchant or ship-owner, rich or poor, aristocrat or low-born alike';
⁴⁸
in which no measure could be adopted, no law passed, save by the votes of all the Athenian people. It was a great and noble experiment, a state in which, for the first time, a citizen could feel himself both engaged and in control. Nothing in Athens, or indeed Greece, would ever quite be the same again.

And that, for Cleisthenes and all who supported him, was absolutely the point. The sponsors of the Athenian revolution were no giddy visionaries moved by shimmering notions of brotherhood with the poor, but rather hard-nosed pragmatists whose goal, quite simply, was to profit as Athenian noblemen by making their city strong. To this ambition, and to the whole immense project that followed from it, they brought a desperate energy. Time, as they well knew, was hardly on their side. It was not only that Cleomenes, 'who felt that the Athenians had shown him disrespect in word and deed',
⁴⁹
was set on revenge; Cleisthenes also feared, with both Hippias and Isagoras plotting their returns, that the city might implode at any moment into rival factions. Dynastic feuding, having brought Athens to the point of ruin, was simply too lethal to be tolerated any further - an analysis which even the dynasties themselves appeared reluctantly now to have accepted.

Yet how to neutralise them? Cleisthenes' solution was both brilliantly simple and quite ferociously ambitious: to suppress a citizen's identification with family, neighbourhood and local clan chief altogether. Since these were instincts that had long come naturally to almost everyone in Attica, the plan to scotch them required peculiarly ingenious and detailed measures. Punctiliously, Cleisthenes sliced up the countryside, with its ancient tapestry of towns, estates and villages, into almost 150 separate districts. It was from these, the 'demes', and no longer from their families, that the citizens of the new democracy would henceforward be obliged to take their second names. Their civic identity too — for a young man, when he came of age, might become a citizen of Athens under Cleisthenes' reforms only by being enrolled within a deme. This was to apply to the haughtiest Eupatrid and the humblest ploughman in the field alike: both, as fellow demes-men, would share the same second name. Not all Eupatrids were necessarily thrilled by this innovation, of course. Some of them, particularly those so grand that they had an estate or village, and thereby a deme, named after them, made their disgruntlement with the new order all too clear. The Boutads, for instance, fed up with having to share their distinguished nomenclature with riff-raff, pointedly gave themselves a new name: the Authentic Boutads.

Still, they had to be careful. Sniff too pointedly at one's fellow demesmen, and even an Authentic Boutad might find himself excluded from public life. Cleisthenes, with his customary pre-emptive cunning, had ordained that demesmen should select delegates from among themselves to travel to Athens, and there prepare the agenda for the Assembly. What aristocrat worth his salt was going to put snobbery above such a plum opportunity? Just as Cleisthenes had to encourage the Eupatrids not to sulk in their tents, so he had to beware a counter-danger: that an ambitious nobleman might use his deme as a springboard to tyranny. Against that peril, deploying both their habitual foresight and their fiendish taste for complicating anything they touched, the founders of the democracy massed a whole array of checks and balances. Attica, already partitioned into demes, was scored with further patterning and fretwork. Demes were bunched into 'thirds'; a 'third', as the name implied, was then grouped with two others to form a tribe. Since the thirds would all be drawn from separate corners of Attica — one from a mountainside, perhaps another from the coast, and another from nearby Athens herself — every tribe, of which there were ten in all, inevitably served to snarl up ancient roots. In place of the primal simplicities of the clan, the Athenian people could now enjoy infinitely more artificial and finely calibrated loyalties. Tribes, thirds and demes: here were complexities not easily manipulable by even the best-connected aristocrats.

But could they be made to work? Since no one had ever attempted to found a democracy before, no one actually knew. Watching the progress of the revolution in mounting alarm, Athens' neighbours could hardly afford to take its failure for granted — and Cleomenes, in particular, had good reason to fear the worst. If Cleisthenes and his associates, labouring furiously to entrench their reforms, always kept one nervous eye on the Spartans, then so too did the Spartan king, as he plotted counter-revolution, dread that he might be in a race against time himself. Fabulously intricate though the democratic reforms were, their potential appeared to Cleomenes ominously clear. No longer divided among themselves, the citizens of a democratic Athens would at last be able to present a united front to their neighbours. The sheer size of Attica would give them a truly fearsome capability. For centuries a military pygmy, Athens appeared on the verge of becoming, almost overnight, a heavyweight.

And most wounding of all for Cleomenes was the fact that he, by deposing the Pisistratids, had effectively served as the midwife of the Athenians' rogue regime. He was well aware that many of his countrymen, resentful of his proactive foreign policy, were starting to whisper against him, muttering about over-stretch and complaining that all his meddlings in Athens had led only to disaster. For the moment, no one was strong enough to challenge him openly. The ephors were still reluctant to tread on his toes, and his fellow king, Demaratus, son of the once-plain girl who had been granted beauty by the apparition of Helen, remained firmly in his shadow. Yet the longer the Athenians thumbed their noses, the greater was the damage to his prestige, and the more closely he would need to guard his back. Preparing for his final bout against Cleisthenes, Cleomenes could not afford to take any chances. No swanning into Attica with a few bodyguards this time. When, in the summer of 506
bc
, he and Demaratus finally advanced across the Isthmus, Isagoras in their train, the two kings led a strike force formed not only of their own steel-limbed countrymen but of contingents summoned from across the Peloponnese. They had other allies, too. The Thebans, still smarting from the Athenians' alliance with Plataea, readily joined the party by invading from the west. Meanwhile, crossing the straits that separated Attica from the long, narrow island of Euboea to the north, an army from the city of Chalcis formed the third prong of what now stood revealed as a brilliantly co-ordinated assault. Cleomenes had done his work well. Athens was effectively surrounded. The infant democracy seemed certain to be strangled in its cradle.

Yet as the Athenians, opting to confront their deadliest opponents first, prepared to march southwards to meet the two Spartan kings, they might have found a plausible omen of hope in the route ahead of them. The road was no ordinary one. Every September a great procession of the Athenian people would take it, garlanded with myrtle, dressed in white, raising, as they walked, the
'iacche',
an ululation of joy and triumph. Not for nothing was the road known as the 'Sacred Way' — for it led, seventeen miles from Athens, to the holy shrine of Eleusis, where a great mystery would be taught: that from death life might arise and from the darkest despair the light of hope. No more propitious place for a defence of the city's liberty could possibly have been imagined — and sure enough, when the Athenians arrived at Eleusis, they discovered that a miracle had indeed occurred.

The Spartans, and all the vast host that had marched with them, had gone. Demaratus, it was said, jealous of his fellow king and mistrustful of his foreign adventures, had been fomenting dissent. Many of the Peloponnesian allies, led by Corinth, had duly deserted; Cleomenes, finding himself suddenly without an army, had been forced, in impotent fury, to abort the invasion. The Athenians, stunned by the sheer scale of their deliverance, could presume only that the gods had come to their rescue — although some of them, remembering Cleisthenes' previous facility with backhanders, may have wondered whether they actually owed as much to Alcmaeonid gold.

Not that the Thebans, in their hatred of Athens, could be bribed. Swinging swiftly northwards to meet them, the new model army of the democracy now faced its first authentic test. Cleisthenes, and everyone who had laboured so hard with him on his reforms, braced themselves for the result. One question, in particular, was about to be answered. Accustomed as the average Athenian was to fighting in the train of a great aristocrat, would he now feel sufficient loyalty to a novel and wholly artificial innovation, his tribe, to stand in the line of battle, to cover the flank of his fellow demesman, to fight not for a clan lord but for an ideal, for liberty, for Athens herself? The answer, resoundingly, triumphantly, was yes. The Theban invasion force was annihilated. On the same day, crossing into Euboea, the Athenians forced Chalcis to sue for a humiliating peace, and accept, on what had previously been her own territory, a huge colony of four thousand Athenian settlers.

And so it was that the Athenians found themselves suddenly a great power. Not just in one field, but in everything they set their minds to, they gave vivid proof of what equality and freedom of speech might achieve. As the subjects of a tyrant, what had they accomplished? Nothing exceptional, to be sure. With the tyrant gone, however, they had suddenly become the best fighters in the world. Held down like slaves, they had shirked and slacked; once they had won their freedom, not a citizen but he could feel that he was labouring for himself.
³¹

It appeared that democracy might indeed be made to work.

A boast that the Athenians now joyously proclaimed to all the world. Returning to their city, they commissioned, in the ecstasy of their deliverance, an immense victory memorial - a chariot led by four horses fashioned completely out of bronze — and placed it directly beyond the gates to the Acropolis. There, raised on what had previously been the supreme showcase for aristocratic megalomania, the intimidating sculpture gleamed, the first thing that anyone entering the citadel would see, a monument raised not to any individual but to 'the sons of the Athenians'
⁵²
— to the people as a whole. Elsewhere, too, all across Athens, the renewed din of chiselling bore ample witness to the democracy's enthusiasm for a facelift. Masons who had previously been labouring on the Pisistratids' gargantuan temple could now be found at work on the sloping hill west of the Acropolis, the Pnyx, hewing from its rock an immense new meeting-place for the Assembly, capable of seating up to five thousand at a time: a first and fitting monument to government by the people. Meanwhile, stretching away northwards beyond the Pnyx and the Acropolis, in the great square raised to himself by Pisistratus, other workmen were systematically excising all traces of the tyranny. The half-completed temple of Zeus was left to stand as a monument to the tyrants' folly, but the massive public space that Pisistratus had cleared in the heart of the city could not so easily be abandoned — not least because the citizens of the new democracy needed such a meeting-place. 'Agora', they began to call it — the word for an area that all Greek cities had, a space where people might freely gather. The previous Athenian
agora,
to the north-east of the Acropolis, found its venerable public buildings supplanted, while the new one, of a scale and beauty altogether more worthy of the dignity of the people, was duly enshrined as the symbolic heart of the democracy.'
⁵³