The Reforms,and Motives of Cleisthenes

Concerning the Reforms and Motives of Cleisthenes

Scholarly opinion remains divided upon the motives that impelled Cleisthenes to enact his reforms, ranging from estimations of self-serving opportunism to those of high-minded altruism, with emphasis often placed upon a singular aspect of the reforms, at the expense of others, to substantiate the respective viewpoint.

However, the motives of a politician are seldom simple, even when they may be deduced with reasonable accuracy, and are more likely to reflect a conjunction of self-interest and public-spiritedness; and this appears to be the case with respect to Cleisthenes.

Herodotus posited that Cleisthenes only incorporated the previously disregarded populace into his faction when Isagoras was gaining an advantage over him (5.69.2), and within this context, a certain degree of opportunism may be suspected in his response to the problem of the new citizens. A revision of the citizen lists had transpired soon after the expulsion of Hippias, aimed at those of impure Athenian descent who had previously looked to Peisistratus as their protector:

Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 13.5

Two points remain unclear from this: the identity of these imperilled citizens, and the means by which they were disfranchised. Regarding their identity, it remains plausible that some of these new citizens were foreign mercenaries whom the tyrants had employed to seize power in 546, and whom they continued to employ throughout their regime for security (Herodotus 1.64.1; Thucydides 6.55.3); these may have been permitted by the tyrants to settle in Attica. The other new citizens were likely the descendants of those skilled artisans whom Solon had attracted to Athens by the offer of citizenship (Plutarch, Solon 24.4).

As for the means of disfranchisement, it is possible that the answer resides with the supposedly kinship-based ‘phratries’ or brotherhoods, membership of which constituted the sole formal proof of citizenship prior to Cleisthenes’ reforms. However, under the tyranny, exclusion from the phratries would not have prevented the new citizens from exercising their rights of citizenship by, for example, attending the Ecclesia. Yet the fall of the tyranny would have left them exposed, and the revision of the citizen rolls by the phratries, confining citizenship to members of the phratries, would have deprived them of their citizenship. Cleisthenes’ decision to render membership of the ‘demes’ the sole formal criterion for Athenian citizenship, and his integration of the new citizens into these demes, would have guaranteed their goodwill. Cleisthenes would naturally have anticipated that their resultant gratitude would be translated into firm support for himself and his faction, especially at the time of the elections for the eponymous (chief) archon and other posts of importance.

There exists also reason to suspect opportunism in the tribal reforms. Branches of the Alcmaeonids, and presumably their political supporters, resided in three large demes within the city of Athens, and other branches of the family in their (probable) original home on the south-west coast of Attica. Suspicions of gerrymandering for political purposes are aroused when it becomes apparent not only that these three demes were allocated to three different City ‘trittyes’ (thirds), but also that these three City trittyes were placed in the same three tribes as three Coastal trittyes from the south-west coast of Attica – Tribe 1 (Erechtheis), Tribe 7 (Cecropis), and Tribe 10 (Antiochis). If this were the case, then it would have resulted in the Alcmaeonid supporters and dependants being the dominant political force in two of the three trittyes in three different tribes. Thus, Alcmaeonid control could be exercised in the tribal elections for the post of ‘strategos’ (tribal general), and on the 50 tribal councillors of the new Boule of 500.

In addition, should the majority of the new citizens whose citizenship was restored by Cleisthenes have resided in and around the city, as is generally believed, then Alcmaeonid influence could also be exerted in most of the ten City trittyes. By contrast, his political opponents were at a distinct disadvantage, as their supporters and dependants could only dominate in one out of three trittyes of the new tribes, since the other two trittyes were located in geographically separate and politically non-partisan areas of Attica. Furthermore, certain trittyes were not geographically compact, but possessed demes that were geographically distant from the main locality of the trittys: this was clearly designed by Cleisthenes to render it difficult for his political opponents to rally support in the trittys for the election of strategos, and to influence the selection within the trittys of councillors for the Boule of 500.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to credit that Cleisthenes needed to have embarked upon such a complex reform had he merely desired to promote the interests of the Alcmaeonids. The history of the sixth century, including his own experience of recent events, had caused Cleisthenes to appreciate fully the nature of the problems that had so grievously troubled Athens: the intense rivalry of the aristocratic-led factions in their struggle for power, which had caused political instability. Solon’s earlier attempt to resolve this problem had failed because he had not addressed the source of factionalism: the domination of the four Ionian or Attic tribes by leading aristocratic families in their own region. The origins of their domination lay in prehistory, when kinship or alleged kinship was the common element that bound together the Athenians in nationality. Members of the four Ionian tribes traced their ancestry back to the four sons of Ion, the son of Apollo. Each tribe (‘phyle’) possessed a lower tier of organisation, the local phratries or brotherhoods; these consisted of individual households or families (‘oikoi’, sing. ‘oikos’) and clans (‘gene’, sing. ‘genos’) in which a number of families traced their descent from a common legendary ancestor. It was within these local phratries, and consequently within the Ionian tribes, that the aristocratic clans were able to exert their political dominance, due to their social status, economic strength, and religious leadership, and thus maintain their hold over different regions of Attica.

The rise, in the first half of the sixth century, of three such aristocratic-led factions, the ‘Men of the Plain’, the ‘Men of the Coast’, and the ‘Men beyond the Hills’, had led to political upheavals and ultimately to tyranny, with tough consequences for the aristocratic clans in opposition to the tyrant. The ending of tyranny had led to the renewal of feuding between the aristocratic-led factions and to political instability, culminating in the exile of the clan of the Alcmaeonids and 700 families who were their political adherents. The consequences of failure in this factional style of politics had become too high a price to pay for the losers; but, more importantly, Athens would never acquire the political unity and stability that were the essential pre-conditions for becoming a state of the first rank in the Greek world. Thus, Cleisthenes’ reform of the demes and the tribes was designed to break the overriding regional power of these aristocratic clans and their factions by ending the formal political functions of the phratries and the old tribes; and, by means of the Boule of 500 and the Ecclesia (Assembly), to create a balanced constitution wherein the people’s political power was sufficient to act as an equal counter-weight to that of the aristocracy.