Return to text.
10 Alcaeus, 360. A poet from Lesbos, in the Aegean, he is quoting Aristodemus of Sparta.
Return to text.
11 The most commonly accepted date. See R. Wallace. Some historians have speculated that Solon’s reforms postdated his archonship.
Return to text.
12 Solon, 3.
Return to text.
13 Ibid., 36. It is likely that the lifting of the boundary stones signaled less a straight cancellation of debt than a reform of the system of sharecropping, whereby tenants paid a sixth of their produce to their landlords.
Return to text.
14 Ibid., 5.
Return to text.
15 Ibid., 4.
Return to text.
16 Aristotle, Politics, 1274a16–17.
Return to text.
17 The Iliad, 6.208.
Return to text.
18 Pindar, Fifth Isthmian Ode, 12–13. The poem was written in 478 BC, when noblemen could still be described in terms that evoked the gods on Olympus, but only with stern caveats. Pindar’s poem, having described the glory won by a victor in the games at Corinth, next gives him a stark warning: “Do not try to become Zeus.”
Return to text.
19 Plutarch, Table Talk, 2.5.2.
Return to text.
20 Although, according to the uncorroborated evidence of Thucydides (1.126), Cylon and his brother managed to escape.
Return to text.
21 For the dating, see Rhodes (1981), p. 84.
Return to text.
22 Such, at any rate, is the traditional story. The chronology is a trifle awkward.
Return to text.
23 Herodotus, 6.125.
Return to text.
24 Whoever inaugurated the Great Panathenaea, with its grand procession to the summit of the Acropolis, must surely also have been responsible for the construction of the ramp. Other names have been proposed (see Shapiro, pp. 20–1), but Lycurgus, with his responsibilities toward the cult statue of Athena, to say nothing of his clearly attested political dominance in the 560s BC, appears overwhelmingly the likeliest candidate.
Return to text.
25 This description of Athena’s statue derives from Pausanias (1.26.7), who appears to be implying that the holy image was a meteorite. Confusingly, however, it is also described in a speech by Demosthenes (Against Androtion, 13) as being fashioned out of olive wood. The truth has been lost.
Return to text.
26 At issue is the question of whether the so-called “Bluebeard Temple”—named after a figure found among the rubble of its pediments—was built as a replacement for the seventh-century temple of Athena Polias or in competition with it. If the former, then the Boutads were probably responsible for its construction; if the latter, the Alcmaeonids. The scholarly consensus, having originally favored the first hypothesis, has now swung in favor of the second. See Dinsmoor, for the archaeological evidence, and Greg Anderson (pp. 70–1), for the part played by the Alcmaeonids.
Return to text.
27 Such, at any rate, on the principle of cui bono, appears the likeliest explanation of the muddled descriptions of the episode that have survived.
Return to text.
28 Almost certainly. The epitaph comes from the “Anavyssos Kouros,” a memorial statue raised to a young man named Croisos, who is conventionally assumed to have been an Alcmaeonid killed at Pallene.
Return to text.
29 Aristotle, The Constitution of the Athenians, 15.5.
Return to text.
30 Solon, 36.
Return to text.
31 Aristotle, The Constitution of the Athenians, 16.2.
Return to text.
32 Ibid., 16.5.
Return to text.
33 Ibid., 16.7.
Return to text.
34 The exact date is unknown. It would later please the Alcmaeonids to pretend that they had never reached an accommodation with the tyrants, but had always remained in obdurate and principled exile. Only the discovery in 1938 of an archon list from the late fifth century BC gave the game away.
Return to text.
35 Plutarch, Solon, 29. He is said to have made the comment to Thespis, who was held by the ancients to have been the inventor of tragedy. Since Solon died around 560 BC, and Thespis was said to have produced the first tragedy in 535, the tradition is clearly unreliable in the extreme.
Return to text.
36 Herodotus, 5.93.
Return to text.
37 Thucydides, 6.54.
Return to text.
38 Ibid., 6.57.
Return to text.
39 Aristotle, The Constitution of the Athenians, 19.3.
Return to text.
40 Herodotus, 5.63.
Return to text.
41 Ibid.
Return to text.
42 Aristotle, The Constitution of the Athenians, 20.1.
Return to text.
43 We are nowhere told explicitly that Cleisthenes made his proposals to the Assembly, but such is the almost universal presumption.
Return to text.
44 Whether Cleisthenes ever used the word “demokratia” is much debated. The consensus is that he didn’t, and that it was not coined until the 470s BC, more than thirty years later. In a sense, however, the argument is sterile: later generations of Athenians certainly recognized the form of government established by Cleisthenes as a democracy, and so too has almost every modern historian. In this book, I will refer to it, and post-Cleisthenic Athens generally, as a democracy. For the reasoning of a classicist who would argue that this is no anachronism, see Hansen (1986).
Return to text.
45 Herodotus, 5.66.
Return to text.
46 Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 279.
Return to text.
47 Such, at any rate, is the implication of a phrase in Herodotus (5.78), where he associates the sudden rise to greatness of democratic Athens with the benefits that derive from “isegoria”—literally, equality in the agora, the place of assembly in a Greek city, but with a specific subsidiary meaning: that of the right of every citizen to address the people. Some scholars argue that isegoria was introduced to Athens by later reformers.
Return to text.
48 Plato, Protagoras, 9.82.
Return to text.
49 Herodotus, 5.74.
Return to text.
50 In Greek, the Eteoboutadai.
Return to text.
51 Herodotus, 5.78.
Return to text.
52 Ibid., 5.77.
Return to text.
53 For the best account of the earlier agora, see Robertson.
Return to text.
54 Herodotus, 5.73.
Return to text.