How to Ostracize If You Must
Solon was Archon for a mere (busy!) year after which he went into exile for ten years in order to avoid the temptation to fiddle with his laws. He opined that his laws should not be changed for a hundred years. It didn’t quite work out like that. Instead, a repeated contest between elites and society ensued.
Solon had tried to move Athens toward a more capable state and institutionalize popular control while keeping the elites happy, or happy enough. But how happy is happy enough? Conflict soon broke out and led to a series of tyrants, in effect dictators, holding power sometimes with force, sometimes with popular support. Yet Solon’s reforms were popular and had gained legitimacy so that all Athenians, even eager tyrants, had to at least pay homage to them, and in the process, they often deepened them.
Peisistratos, the first tyrant to follow Solon, is famous for the cunning ways in which he overthrew Athenian political institutions. On one occasion he deliberately wounded himself and duped the citizens into allowing him armed bodyguards for protection, which he then used to take control of Athens. On another occasion, having been deposed, he rode back into Athens in a chariot with a stately woman dressed as Athena and fooled people into thinking he had been chosen by the god herself to rule Athens. Once in power, however, Peisistratos didn’t totally repudiate Solon’s legacy, but instead continued to increase the state’s capacity. He undertook monumental constructions in Athens and launched a series of measures to integrate Athens with the countryside in Attica. These innovations included rural circuit judges, a system of roads centered on Athens, and processions linking Athens with rural sanctuaries, as well as the Great Panathenaea festival. The religious festivals were a direct descendant of some of Solon’s other measures because he had tried to restrict private elite festivals in favor of more communal public ones. Peisistratos also coined the first Athenian money.
This is the Red Queen in action. Solon started this dynamic path in earnest, and Peisistratos followed along it, even if the process involved wild gyrations. Tyrants, when they rose to power, gave the upper hand to the state and the elites. Yet they couldn’t dominate society and the demos (“the people”), and they also vied for its support. Though Peisistratos was succeeded by his sons Hippias and Hipparchus and then by Isagoras backed by the rival city-state of Sparta, the demos struck back. In 508 BCE a massive popular uprising swept Cleisthenes into power. The reforms Cleisthenes implemented were again aimed at strengthening both state and society, but he went further in the three objectives that Solon had tried to achieve over eight decades earlier—strengthening the hand of society against the elites, increasing the state’s capacity, and loosening the cage of norms.
Let’s start with state building. Cleisthenes developed an elaborate fiscal system, which levied a poll tax on metics (resident foreigners); direct taxes on the wealthy, who had to pay for festivals or outfitting warships; a variety of customs, tolls, and charges, particularly at the port of Piraeus; and taxes on the silver mines of Attica. During his Archonship, the state began to provide an array of public services, not just security and coinage, but also infrastructure in the form of walls, roads, bridges, prisons, and relief for orphans and the handicapped. Equally remarkable was the emergence of a type of state bureaucracy. Aristotle claims that in the days of Aristides, around 480–470 BCE, there were 700 men working for the state in Attica and 700 abroad, and in addition 500 guards in the docks and 50 on the Acropolis.
This state was also far more democratically controlled than the one that Solon had set up. To achieve this democratic control, Cleisthenes recognized that he had to further weaken the cage of norms and move away from the tribal basis of political power. So in a daring move, he abolished the four tribes that had populated Solon’s Boule of 400 and replaced them with a new Boule of 500 composed of people chosen by lot from 10 new tribes named after Athenian heros. Each tribe had 50 representatives in the Boule. Each of the tribes was divided into three smaller units, called trittyes (“thirds” of tribes), and each of these was further subdivided into regional political units, called demes. There were 139 demes scattered throughout Attica (as shown in Map 2). The creation of the regional units in itself was a significant step in the process of state building, almost completely polishing off what was left of the preexisting kin-based identities. Aristotle summarized the effects of this reform by noting that Cleisthenes “made fellow demesmen of those living in each deme so they would not reveal the new citizens by using a man’s father’s name, but would use his deme in addressing him.”
Map 2. The Athenian Demes
To further increase the political power of Athenian citizens against the elites, Cleisthenes also lifted the class restrictions on membership of institutions that had existed during Solon’s days. Membership of the Boule was now open to all male citizens over the age of thirty, and because each could serve for only a year and at most twice in his lifetime, most Athenian men served at some point in their lives. The Boule’s president was randomly chosen and served for twenty-four hours, allowing most Athenian citizens to be in charge at some point. Aristotle summed all of this up by stating:
The people had taken control of affairs.
The Boule had authority over expenditures and there was a series of boards of magistrates that implemented policy. Though these boards were chosen by lot and served annually, they were aided by professional slaves acting as state functionaries.
Cleisthenes followed in Solon’s footsteps in building on and institutionalizing existing norms that were helpful for strengthening the political power of Athenian citizens while also battling the cage of norms. Most notably, he formalized the institution of ostracism as a means of restraining the political dominance of powerful individuals. According to this new law, every year the assembly could take a vote on whether or not to ostracize someone. If at least 6,000 people voted and at least half of them were in favor of an ostracism, then each citizen got to write the name of a person whom they wanted ostracized on a shard of pottery (called an “ostrakon,” and hence the term ostracism). The person whose name was written on the most shards was ostracized—banished from Athens for ten years. Aristotle notes about the law that “it had been passed by a suspicion of those in power.” Like Solon’s Hubris Law, it was a tool using and transforming the norms of society for disciplining elites. Even Themistocles, the genius behind the Athenian victory at Salamis over the Persians and probably the most powerful man in Athens in his day, was ostracized sometime around 476 BCE, when people began to worry that he was getting too powerful and because he wanted to focus on Sparta, and not Persia, as the real enemy. (An ostrakon with Themistocles’s name is shown in the photography section.) Ostracism was used sparingly, and only fifteen people were ostracized over the 180-year period when the institution was in full force, but just the threat of ostracism was a powerful way for citizens to discipline elites.
The evolution of the Athenian Constitution did not stop with Cleisthenes, who wrote, according to Aristotle, what turned out to be only the sixth of the eleven Athenian constitutions (did we mention that the Red Queen effect could be messy?). In the process, Athens steadily moved toward both greater empowerment of citizens and a stronger state. True to the nature of the Red Queen, none of this happened without a protracted struggle, with elites pushing in one direction and society in the other.