Unlike the Peloponnese, with its tradition of Dorian invasion from the north, Athens claimed to be “autochthonous”—that is, its inhabitants had occupied the same land forever. Like any such claim, it was largely fiction, but it helped to make up for Athens’s relative poverty in religion and myth: it has nothing to compare with the great legends of Thebes (the Oedipus story) or the Peloponnese (Heracles; the house of Atreus). There was one hero, however, who could be regarded as specially Athenian, and that was Theseus, to whom the original political synoecism of Attica was attributed even by a hardheaded writer like Thucydides.
Theseus slaying the MinotaurTheseus slaying the Minotaur, detail of a vase (stamnos) painting by the Kleophrades Painter, 6th century bce; in the British Museum. Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum
At whatever date one puts this “Thesean” synoecism, or centralization (perhaps 900 would be safe), it seems that the late Dark Age in Attica saw the opposite process taking place at the physical level; that is, the villages and countryside of Attica were in effect “colonized” from the centre in the course of the 8th century. The process may not have been complete until even later. That explains why Athens was not one of the earliest colonizing powers: the possibility of “internal colonization” within Attica itself was (like Sparta’s expansion into Messenia) an insurance against the kind of short-term food shortages that forced such places as Corinth and Thera to siphon off part of their male population.
In fact, Athens did acquire one notable overseas possession as early as 610 bce, the city of Sigeum on the way to the Black Sea. Yet as long as its neighbour Megara controlled Salamis, a large and strategically important island in the Saronic Gulf, the scope for long-distance Athenian naval operations was restricted; the excellent tripartite natural harbour of Piraeus was not safe for use until Salamis was firmly Athenian. Until then, Athens had to make do with the more open and less satisfactory port facilities of Phalerum, roughly in the region of the modern airport. Thus there was an obvious brake on naval expansion.
By the later 7th century then, Athens was looking abroad, and it is not surprising to find it experiencing some of the strains that in the 8th century had led to tyrannies elsewhere. Indeed, it narrowly escaped a first attempt at tyranny itself, that of Cylon, the Olympic victor (630s). The close connection between athletic success and military values has been noted; there was an equally close connection between athletic and political achievement, and not just in the Archaic age. Cylon was helped by his father-in-law Theagenes of Megara, a fact that underlines, as does Megarian possession of Salamis until the 6th century, the lateness of Athens’s growth to great power status: Classical Megara was a place of small consequence. That Cylon’s attempt was a failure is interesting, but too little is known about his potential following to prove either that Athenian tyranny was an idea whose time had not yet come or that there is social and economic significance merely in the fact of his having made the attempt.
Cylon’s attempt had two consequences for Athenian history. The first is certain but fortuitous: Cylon’s followers were put to death in a treacherous and sacrilegious way, which was held to have incriminated his killers, notably Megacles, a member of the Alcmaeonid genos. Pollution attracted in this way is a slippery conception; it could wake or sleep, as Aeschylus put it. That particular pollution adhered even to persons who were not on their father’s side members of the Alcmaeonid genos, such as the great 5th-century leader Pericles, and was usually “woken up” for deliberate and political ends.
The other consequence may not be a consequence at all but a coincidence in time. It was not many years after the Cylon affair that the Athenian lawgiver Draco gave the city its first comprehensive law code (perhaps 621). Because of the code’s extreme harshness, Draco’s name has become a synonym for legal savagery. But the code (the purely political features of which are irrecoverably lost to the present short of some lucky inscriptional find) was surely intended to define and so ameliorate conditions; the Athenian equivalents of the “bribe-eating basileis” of the Boeotian Hesiod’s poem could still dispense a rough, but no longer arbitrary, justice. Further than that it is not safe to go; Draco’s code, like that of the statesman and poet Solon (c. 630–560), was destroyed by antidemocrats in the late 5th century. A detailed constitution foisted on Draco has survived in the treatise called the Constitution of Athens, attributed to Aristotle and found on papyrus in 1890. That document says much about the psychology of 411 bce and little about the situation in 621. Solon
Whatever the connection between Cylon and Draco—and one must beware the trap of bringing all the meagre facts about the Archaic period into relation with each other—firmer grounds for postulating economic and social unrest in late 7th-century Attica are to be found in the poetry of Solon. Solon is the first European politician who speaks to the 21st century in a personal voice (Tyrtaeus reflects an ethos and an age). Like the other Archaic poets mentioned, Solon wrote for symposia, and his more frivolous poetry should not be lost sight of in preoccupation with what he wrote in self-justification. He was a man who enjoyed life and wanted to preserve rather than destroy.
Solon.© Photos.com/Thinkstock
Solon’s laws, passed in 594, were an answer to a crisis that has to be reconstructed largely from his response to it. Most scholars believe that Solon’s laws continued to be available for consultation in the 5th and 4th centuries; that (as noted above) did not prevent distortion and manipulation. In any case, by the 4th century, the age of treatises like the Constitution of Athens and other works by local historians of Attica (“Atthidographers”), much about early Attica had been forgotten or was misunderstood. Above all, there was a crucial failure to understand the dependent status of those who worked on the land of Attica before Solon abolished that status, which was conceived of as a kind of obligation or debt; this abolition, or “shaking off of burdens,” was the single most important thing Solon did. When one divides Solon’s work, as will be done here for convenience, into economic, political, and social components, one may fail to grasp the possibility that there was a unified vision organizing it all and that in this sense no one reform was paramount. Perhaps the poem of Solon’s that sums up best what he stood for is a relatively neglected and not easily elucidated one, but an important one nonetheless, in which he seems to claim that nobody else could have done what he did and still have “kept the cream on the milk.” That is to say, his was, in intention at least, a more just though still a stratified society that sought to retain the cooperation of its elite.