Professor Donald
Kagan: I think the last thing I mentioned to you was the
attempted coup d'état on the part of
a nobleman by the name of Cylon, who was attempting to establish
a tyranny of the sort that was becoming common in the
neighborhood, and that he was the son-in-law
of a tyrant in next-door Megara. The coup failed,
but the problems that we imagine produced the coup did
not go away, and once these evidence of
continuing pressure for change away from the traditional
aristocratic republic, which the early polis
was, towards something that would challenge the unquestioned
traditional rule of the aristocracy.
Again, these are all traditional dates and shouldn't
be taken too seriously as precise,
but probably reflect a pretty decent chronology in a general
way. So, in the traditional year of
621 we hear that Athens received its first written law code,
famous as the Code of Draco or in Greek it would be
Dracon. Reports that we have of it
indicate that one kind of law that was included in the code
was concerning homicide, which has a special place in
Greek thinking. Probably it's true of most
primitive societies that homicide involves religious
ideas. The Greeks believed that the
killing of men was accepted in wartime, was a religious
pollution that had to be taken care of one way or another.
Beyond that there was also the primitive thing that was not
particularly religious, but reflected primitive
thinking that all homicides need to be avenged,
and so the blood feud was clearly part of the way to deal
with homicide in early Greek history.
As is true of most early societies there comes a time
that no longer will do, that there's a sufficient
civilization, urbanization,
whatever it is that made the change,
that people feel this has got to stop.
One reason it does is, of course, because it tears the
community apart, and as you are in the business
of building a community, which is what's happening here
in the polis, you can't have that going on.
One reason it is the way to settle things is,
because there isn't any proper government.
There are only these noblemen. There is a council to be sure,
but it's all a question of going to somebody,
who has power and has respect, and getting a judgment from
them. But as time passes,
that's not good enough, and as the community becomes
something that is more and more unified,
there is a search for a better outcome and that is what
resulted in the Code of Draco. Just the fact that there is
written code, so that it is now available to
anybody who read, which is not to say lots of
people, but even so people who can read can now tell it to
other people. That very fact is the sign of
the decline of the power of the aristocracy, because they alone
used to know what the law was or claim to know it,
and people would go to them and say what's the law,
and they could administer it as they saw fit,
which gave them extraordinary power, not to say prestige.
Now, when it is possible, at least in some realms of the
law, to know what that law is that has reduced the special
place that the aristocrats have in society. Stories are told about the
Code of Draco; like most early law codes,
and we can compare the Draconic Code with a famous or less
famous ones, much older, that we find
especially in Mesopotamia in the Ancient Near East.
The most famous of these because it has been inscribed on
a remarkable piece of sculpture which is now in the Louvre in
Paris, the Code of Hammurabi from the
second millennium B.C., is really quite similar in its
essence. It says, if so and so does such
a thing, this is what the punishment is.
From our point of view, early codes like Draco are
notorious for how harsh they are.
The Greeks later on said that the Code of Draco was written
not in ink, but in blood. In fact, what it does is to
codify what had been the ordinary practice.
Nobody was inventing laws; they were writing down what had
been the customary procedures. And again, a characteristic for
such developments is that over time when people know how harsh
these things are and as society sort of calms down from the more
wild condition that it was in at an earlier time,
it tends to reduce the severity of the penalties and to
legislate, however the legislation goes forward,
in a more gentle way. So, that's another development
which is obviously the consequence--aristocrats don't
give up their power willingly out of the goodness of their
hearts. There's pressure out there for
access to the legal process for the ordinary person,
and again I think, it's easy to believe that a lot
of that pressure is coming from that hoplite farmer class that
is becoming more important and more demanding all the time.
Another change in the old placid life of the early
Athenian republic, as we imagine it to be,
is the conquest by the Athenians of the Island of
Salamis that lies in the Saronic Gulf to the west of Attica
between Attica and Megara. Athens and Megara will contest
the control of Salamis for some time and fight each other over
it, and on this occasion sometime
here in the seventh century, probably towards the end of the
seventh century, Athens conquers Salamis and
populates it with Athenians. It's not really a colony in the
sense that these apoichia I described for you are;
it simply becomes part of Attica, as do all the
subdivisions in Attica. But it's the first occasion
that we see of the physical expansion of the Athenian
polis which is indicative of the kind of stuff we've been
talking about elsewhere as well, and yet another sign takes
place about the same time, end of the seventh,
very early in the sixth century.
The establishment of the first overseas colony by the
Athenians at a place called Sigeum across the Aegean Sea,
just at the entrance to the Dardanelles, the Hellespont and
that is not an accident, I think, because that root,
through the Hellespont, through the Sea of Marmara,
through the Bosphorus and into the Black Sea,
will, as Athens develops economically,
become the most critical trade route for Athens indeed.
After a while when Athens has developed a mixed economy and as
population grows it becomes dependent on that route for
supplying it with the grain that it needs as the staple of life
for its people. So, this is the first little
step towards a very important development for Athens in the
future. I guess the reasons for it,
late and less pressing than in the other places,
but they must be the same to some considerable degree.
Hunger for land which means that there is a growing
population, that needs additional land and also because
of the location of it, it's inescapable I think that
they were also thinking that early of commercial
considerations and it turns out that there were very great
commercial opportunities in that direction.
So, we've seen a number of signs of change moving Athens in
the direction that the other Greek states were moving,
which bring us in the early sixth century to the first,
I think I've said this before but I want to say it again,
to the first truly living, human being that we come across
probably in all of Greek history,
certainly in that of Athens, Solon, whom we think of as the
great lawgiver for reasons that you've read about and I'll tell
you about in a moment anyway. The reason he is so
much--we can speak of him as a human being is because he wrote
those poems from which I read you some excerpts the other day
and that poem tells us something about him and about the world in
which lived. And, of course,
we have many, many stories about him,
because he was very well remembered as a critical
individual in the history, not only of Athens,
but in Greece. The Greeks later put together a
list of the seven sages, seven wise men of the archaic
period in Greek history and Solon is one of the seven sages.
Indeed, one of the problems about knowing the truth about
what Solon did is that it's pretty clear that lots of
stories that had nothing to do with Solon were attached to
Solon in later ages, because he was the prominent
figure that everybody had heard about and knew something about,
and so it isn't easy to know, if somebody says Solon did this
or Solon said that, whether he really did.
We can only try to sort of figure it out as best we can,
but that's a special problem we have about him.
Now, what becomes apparent, as soon as we examine the
things that brought Solon to the fore,
is that Athens is clearly suffering a very serious
internal problem as we get to these years.
By the way, the traditional date for Solon's appointment as
sole archon in these years is 594 B.C.
Again, we don't have to take that literally but it tells you
we're really talking about the very beginning of the sixth
century. Here's the picture as it is
depicted by Solon himself in his poems, but also in the work of
Herodotus and other later writers.
The crisis in its most acute form takes the shape of
Athenians who have been enslaved.
Some of them have not only been enslaved and live in Attica as
slaves, but some of them have been sold abroad,
and Solon tells us that some of them have been abroad so long
they have forgotten the Athenian language.
So that we have to have a picture in which this problem is
one of some duration. We have to imagine it's at
least a couple of generations old in order for that to make
any sense. But it reaches its peak around
the time I'm talking about. And it's this that--how did
they get to be slaves? This is not a case where
people have always been slaves. These are not people who were
brought from somewhere else as slaves.
These are not people who were conquered and made slaves by the
conquerors. These are Athenian citizens who
used to be free and have become slaves, and the answer to how
they became slaves is through debt.
People were borrowing money and obviously failing to pay it
back, and at a certain point they couldn't borrow money on
the basis of something they could offer as a surety for the
loan. If they had land,
it would have been gone by now. If they had movable products or
movable possessions that would have been gone.
All they had left to give was the person and probably,
I hate to tell you this my friends,
but reality is reality, probably the first thing they
did was to give their children as a surety for the loan and
when the loan was not met, the children became slaves of
the person who had leant them money and at some point,
probably this even happened to grownups themselves,
so that a sufficient number of people had been so enslaved as
to create a very general problem.The story is that
apart from direct slavery, there was another form of
farming by very poor people that led to terrific misery.
The term that the Greeks used for this was the
hektemoroi, which means one sixth men,
and scholars have argued about what does this mean.
These were people who had been so far into debt that they were
essentially sharecroppers and the question is did they keep
one sixth or did they keep five sixth?
I think anybody who knows anything about what's possible
on a farm like this realizes it couldn't have been more than one
sixth that they gave away, because they didn't make enough.
They wouldn't have been able to stay alive.
But in any case, these one sixth men were
fundamentally sharecroppers under the control of the people
to whom they owed the debt. Another aspect of this
thing was that the lands that were mortgaged in effect were
shown by a stone that had the mortgage inscribed on it and
placed on the soil. They were called horoi
and so seeing the horoi scattered all over the fields
were indicative of the pitiful lot of the poor farmers,
who had fallen into debt during this period.
Well, scholars have also had a fantastic time trying to figure
out how this came about, and I never found anything that
seems satisfactory to me, based on looking at the sources
or reading people's interpretations until once again
my hero, Victor Hanson,
came down the road and he's a farmer.
It's amazing how much that helps them understand farmers
and I like his interpretation of how things got that way,
so let me give you a quick rundown of how that worked.
Remember these times are times fundamentally of growth of
farming skill, growth of farming return.
People are making a living on areas, farmland that they could
never have made a living on before,
because they've learned how to grow the olives and grow vines
and make olive oil and make wine,
and they have reclaimed land, which had not been useful for
farming in the past and that's how they got into trouble,
because for one thing farmers don't all succeed.
In any society, there are farmers who try to be
good farmers and fail and they fail sometimes through their own
shortcoming, and they fail sometimes because
nature is not kind to them; luck is always part of the game
in farming. But what happens is that they
get into trouble because things don't go well.
They start out; they have a crop,
and the crop doesn't do well. So, they need money for next
year, both to make it through the winter and also to have seed
for the following year. So, what they do is they have
to borrow that money, and if the next crop is bad
too, well there you go, and you can see the whole
process unraveling. I think that's probably the way
it came about. According to Hanson,
the majority of the farmers were not so affected.
They were doing okay. It was the losers who were the
ones who were suffering these things, but there were enough
losers, so that this was a very serious problem.
Now, this rejects other earlier theories, for instance,
that the soil of Attica had become exhausted through over
cropping and so on. If Hanson is right,
this is less likely to be true than it used to be because
there's more diversity, diversification of farming than
there had been in the past. Another theory is that a
cause of the problem was deforestation.
Well, it's perfectly true that Athens was severely deforested
in the course of the centuries, so that Plato could comment on
how this deforesting had denuded Athens of trees by the fourth
century, but there's no reason to think
that that was happening, especially during the time of
Solon. Very probably that
deforestation hadn't gone that far, and in any case its
connection to problems of the farmland are less clear than
they might be. Here's what Hanson finally
concludes about it. He says the crisis was a
natural, evolutionary process of success and failure.
A subtle transformation that occurs when there are
fundamental changes in land use and a growing population and
that seems to me to be the most satisfactory account of how the
Athenians got into that fix. But in that fix they were,
there's no question about it, so the question was,
what is to be done? Now, the pressure to do
something about it, I think is twofold.
Of course, inherently, Athenians would have been
bothered by all of this, even those who were not the
ones who did the suffering. But it's amazing how we all are
able to bear the suffering of our neighbor,
if we're not suffering too. However, the second element I
think that put pressure on everybody, was next door in
Megara when things had gone bad for the poor,
there was a revolution and a tyranny was established,
and so it was down the road in Corinth,
and so it was a little further down the road in Scythian,
so that the dominant people, the satisfied people,
the people who liked things as they were, were worried that,
if they didn't solve their socio-economic problem they
would find themselves confronting a tyranny.
After all, that's what Cylon had in mind back thirty,
thirty-five years ago and the danger was ever present,
and I think that is what you need to have in your mind.
The threat of tyranny was the great element that made
chances or attempts at reform necessary and allowed the
Athenians to give things a try that they would never have
thought of before. So, what they finally decided
to do was to select from among themselves, one Athenian who
would replace all the nine archons of the usual
government of Athens and be given the job of sole
archon for one year, and he would be allowed to
legislate for the Athenians as a way out of the trouble they were
in. Now, think of how desperate
things must be, and one aspect of that
desperation I think we have to believe,
is that there was no way they could have put together a
coalition of citizens who would been sufficiently unified,
sufficiently public-spirited to trust with such an activity.
We have to believe there was sufficient differences of
interest on the part of different elements in the
society that would have made that impossible,
otherwise you don't do this kind of thing.
It is worth pointing out that something like Solon's sole
archonship is heard of about the same time in Greek
history in other towns. Sometimes they appointed
somebody they called an Aesymnetes, somebody who was
supposed to be the guy who settled things for them.
So, it's an idea that came obviously naturally to the
Greeks, but we ought to recognize what an extraordinary
thing it really is. They chose Solon.
Why did they choose Solon? He obviously was reputed to
have the kinds of characteristics which would make
him a competent, intelligent,
wise, fair person to do this kind of thing.
He had achieved fame, notoriety by his military
activity. He had led in the war against
the Megarians and had fought very well and it was out of that
military achievement that he became well known,
and then his other characteristics obviously were
also well known. If you read his poems,
you realize he was a man who knew how to express himself and
to persuade others of what he had in mind and that his
approach was one that was popular.
We should keep in mind what's going on here.
First of all, we are told he was a man--we
have contradictory stories and I think I can understand how the
contradiction arose. One story says he was a
nobleman coming from extremely famous important ancestors.
The other speaks of him as a man of the middle rank,
which doesn't really work out with that.
I think the best explanation I can come up with that,
is that he undoubtedly was a person of noble birth.
In that kind of society, only such a person was likely
to be looked to for a position of leadership.
But I think what may have persuaded folks--well,
he also couldn't have been fabulously wealthy,
but certainly he was not a poor man.
But I think what convinced people that he was of the middle
rank was that his message and the propaganda that he sent out
in his poems, and indeed, the character of
the reforms that he proposed were very much moderate. That's the word that came
to be the one so much admired, and favored,
and sought by the Greek people. Keep in mind this is the period
in Greek history when the Delphic Oracle has come to the
height of its influence in the Greek world and in the
surrounding world as well. The Oracle of Apollo at Delphi
was the most famous place that was putting forward the idea of
moderation. The Greek word is
sophrosyne, self control and moderation.
You remember the messages at the Delphic Oracle,
"know thyself," meaning don't imagine that you are more than a
man, but that you are merely a man
and don't do anything in excess. Moderation is what should be
sought. Greeks never stopped
worshipping at the shrine of moderation for the rest of their
history. A cynical man says the Greeks
were so in love with moderation, because it was so rare among
them, but I think it's rare among all of us.
So, here was Solon who was the spokesman of that very powerful
mode of thinking that was pervading the Greek world at the
time, and no doubt he gave it a great
step forward with the things that he did and the things that
he said. Okay, let's look at a few
of the things that he did. I'm picking out things that I'm
pretty sure really were Solonian;
there were others that are attributed to him that are more
debatable. But the most basic problem is
what are we going to do with these people who are losing
their property, have lost their property,
have lost their freedom, what's to be done about that
agricultural problem we've been talking about?
So, Solon introduced the measure which is called in
Greek, the seisachtheia. Fortunately,
you have it on your computers and you've all copied it down
and taken it to class. So, you can study these things,
right? That measure abolished all
debts that were based on the body of the person,
that is, the surety given was the body of the borrower.
Any debt that was so incurred was abolished,
cancelled. On the other hand,
there was no general cancellation of debts.
In other words, any normal debt that didn't
have that characteristic continued.
Another thing that the poor and the unhappy would have liked,
they would have liked general cancellation of the debt.
I should point out, whenever you have lower class
discontent in the Greek world there are two things that they
typically asked for. One is abolition of debt,
because they're always in debt and the second thing is
redistribution of the land. Now, redistribution of the land
means civil war. Nobody is going to allow his
land to be taken away from him and given to somebody else
without a fight, and so if you go for that,
what you're going to have to do is to have armed force to
achieve it. And you're going to end up with
a tyranny, because that's the kind of things tyrants are more
likely to do. So, he avoided that and he
did not permit redistribution of the land.
If you just look at that land question for a moment,
and the dead bondage question, you can see that it is indeed
the moderate position in between the view of those,
the poor, the slave, the indebted who wanted these
radical changes, and the old aristocracy would
have preferred to just leave things as they were.
Instead, Solon came through with this middling program,
and by the way apparently there was--we don't know how this was
done, but apparently they brought
back Athenians who had been enslaved abroad also.
So, there must have been some expenditure of funds;
somehow they must have collected it from somebody and
brought them back, but the most important thing is
what's done right there in Attica. What all of this does is to
settle down the situation for the moment, but it does not
guarantee that these very same problems that produced the
difficulty we're talking about would not reappear in the
future. I think if we looked at
this measure, it's already a clue to most
everything that's characteristic of the Solonian reforms.
They are moderate, and therefore,
unsatisfactory. That is, they don't solve the
problems that are there, but that doesn't mean they are
not worth anything. For one thing they ameliorate
the problem and therefore they ameliorate the discontent and
the danger to the freedom of the Athenians,
but they also sometimes set the stage for the elimination of the
problem over time, because ways are found,
obviously, for people to manage these things.
If the possibility of debt slavery is taken away,
other forms of managing these things will assert themselves.
Indeed, what we find, and I must say what I'm going
to tell you doesn't solve the mystery,
but what we find as you get to the fifth century,
the Classical Period in Athens, is an extraordinary situation,
because it's so good and so unusual.
This is that most Athenian farmers in the fifth century
seemed to have small, but adequate family farms that
allow many, many, many Athenians to live in a
very satisfactory way, given the expectations that
they had. It never abolished great
bit land holding arrangements that some people had.
There always were, through Athenian history no
matter how thoroughly democratic a state became,
there always were great difference of wealth between
very wealthy people and very poor people.
But what is extraordinary and what would have been very
satisfactory to the Greek political thinkers,
even Aristotle, for instance,
in the fourth century, there was a great middle ground
in which the people were pretty much like each other in their
economic condition, which produces the greatest
stability, the greatest satisfaction,
the greatest capacity for self government.
So, that was one of the consequences,
although it didn't happen as any direct action by Solon.
We are also told by Aristotle and other ancient
sources that Solon changed the coin standard for Athens from
one that was used in the west in the Peloponnesus and in the
west, to one that was used in the
east. He changed the weight from the
Pheidonian measures, Pheidonian coin standard,
to the Euboic standard, which people try to understand
why and how that would work. It would have made trade with
Aegean and the east better, and of course we know that
that's the area that the Athenians are exploiting
vigorously now. Although we must recognize that
when the Athenians get rolling in the trade business,
they do tremendously well in the west as well.
But there's a bigger problem with the story about these coins
than any other. As you know from what I told
you before, the almost universal opinion of coin experts is,
how could he change the coin standards?
There weren't any coins yet. Now, you're either going to
believe them or you're going to believe Aristotle;
you know where I am. Okay, in other steps that
turned out to be very important in the long run,
he encouraged the use of the land for the purpose of
producing cash crops like olive oil and wine,
and the Athenians do use more and more of their soil,
largely because there's more and more of their soil that can
grow that and nothing else. But as they do,
the consequence is to make the agricultural output of Athens
much more diversified than it had been,
which saves you--the more diverse your crops,
the less chance you have to be wiped out in any one year by bad
results, and as a matter of fact,
over time it became a very satisfactory device and helps
explain again the health of Athenian agriculture when we see
it in the fifth century and later.
Another thing that he did--I'm going to talk about
citizenship for a moment; the Greek poleis were
very jealous of their citizenship.
Their theory of the polis was that all
citizens were the descendants of the original founders of the
city. In other words,
everybody in Athens was a relative of some kind.
Of course it wasn't true; certainly in Athens we know
there were many immigrants and so on.
But the fact remains that that was the normal thinking about
it, and the notion of this--the power,
the centrality of the concept of polis to them is
something we need to understand, and they were jealous of it and
selfish with it. This was not something they
would simply allow people to acquire, if they wanted it.
This place is us and it's not them and we don't make people
citizens, and that was essentially the thing.
To be a citizen of Athens in those days, you had to have a
father who was a citizen of Athens;
nothing else would do the trick. But Solon changed that;
Solon offered citizenship to individuals who came to Athens
to settle and could show that they had a valuable skill,
a valuable craft and the results were that Athens would
become in the decades following Solon,
a great center for the manufacturing of a variety of
things; pottery is what we have,
and great painted pottery is a great part of the Athenian
tradition, but sculpture also and all
kinds of things that we probably don't have, because they would
have been destroyed by time. But the idea was,
if you were a skilled craftsman, you could come to
Athens and you would not have to be what you would otherwise be.
Anybody who came to Athens, not under these rules could
stay, could make themselves a permanent resident,
but he would always be what the Greeks called a
metoikois, we say in English a metic,
meaning a resident alien, never to be a citizen.
Only citizens were permitted to own land in Attica.
Only citizens had access to the Athenian courts;
a non-citizen who had to go to court for one reason or another
would have to find a citizen to be his spokesman.
So, you really were cut off from some very--of course a
non-citizen could not participate in the political
life of Athens either. But these people were not going
to be metics, because of the economic skills
that they brought. Solon arranged for them to
become Athenian citizens, very rare thing.
We will have a couple of other occasions in this course and
take a look in a moment when foreigners were permitted to
come to Athens and become citizens,
but they're very rare and there was always something very
special connected with them, and there will always be some
Athenians who will raise at least one eyebrow at the idea of
making a foreigner a citizen of Athens.
But it turned out to be one of those things that Solon
instituted that would have long range consequences,
helpful to the Athenian state. Well, so much for the
economic and social issues, let's turn to the
constitutional questions, because of course--but when
you're talking about an independent republic then the
political and constitutional arrangements are obviously
critical to everybody. I guess it's true in any
society, but it's blatant in a republic.
So, Solon changed the Athenian constitution.
Up to this moment the Athenian constitution came to be what it
was in the way that these things happen in nature,
namely, through tradition; they just kind of grow.
Nobody legislates. But Solon was appointed to
legislate and he was going to attempt to deal with the
problems that he saw. So, what he did first of
all was to arrange Athenian political society on a new
basis. This is as very large matter.
Up to now, where you were in the state, whether you could
serve on the council, whether you could be a
magistrate, depended upon your birth.
Aristocrats alone could hold these positions.
Now that was swept away by Solon's new system.
He changed it so that the determination of who was
eligible to serve in these councils and offices was based
on the wealth that they had. Just to show you--and this is
an argument against the coinage being present in that he did not
fix the rating of citizens for these jobs in money.
He rated them in measures of agricultural produce,
whether dry produce or liquid produce, equally available.
These measures of produce were called medimnoi measures.
So here's how he worked it out. At the top of the scale
there were five--you had to have each year products produced by
your land which were worth 500 medimnoi at least.
So, the people who held that position, that condition were
described as--get ready this is a jawbreaker,
pentakosiomedimnoi, which just means 500
measurement. That is obviously a new term,
a new concept, didn't exist before Solon.
It makes no sense so Solon had to invent that to take care of a
certain class of people that he wanted.
But the next class down was probably, almost certainly,
used for a condition that was already recognized,
but didn't have a formal place in the constitution.
People with 300 measures a year, but not 500,
were called hippeis meaning cavalrymen.
I used that term in another place before.
Then people with 200 measures but not 300 were
zeugitai, yoke fellows you remember,
yoke men. Then those below 200 were
thetes and they were the lowest class in the Athenian
society invented by Solon, again, that was an old term.
The only one that he invented was the pentakosiomed
imnoi.Of course, the critical thing about
it--whatever else I say about it,
this is the important thing; it broke the monopoly of
aristocrats by birth in the political realm.
The first two classes, pentakosiomedimnoi and
hippeis, could hold the archonships and
only they. Now, the zeugitai,
as I think I mentioned to you before, were essentially the
hoplite class. That meant they could not hold
the top jobs in the state. On the other hand,
he established a council of four hundred.
The word for council in Greek is boule.
So, this boule of four hundred, zeugitai could
serve on that and we never will really know what the powers of
that council were, because it doesn't seem--well,
as we shall see, Solon's constitution was never
really put into effect in all its respects,
although this business about the measures was put into
effect. But I think we can guess by
analogy to other councils that it would have considerable
power, that it would have decided many things.
It would not have been an empty honor to be on the council of
400, nor were the thetes excluded from political power
entirely. They, of course,
made up a part of the assembly; the Greek word is
ekklesia and there was certainly an ekklesia
before Solon. You always, in any state that
we know of in the Greek world, if you want to go to war you
must go to the army. Now, the thetes didn't
fight as hoplites, but they could fight as light
armed troops. So, I'm sure they were
consulted, although it was pretty much a formality.
Nonetheless, that's not new,
but what is new and extremely important, is that Solon invents
a new kind of court. It is called in Greek the
heliaia, and what it is,
is a court of appeal. All this time before,
every magistrate, as I believe I mentioned,
had a court of his own that dealt with matters that were
appropriate to his court and that was the end of it.
I suppose, theoretically and probably in reality sometimes,
if somebody didn't like what a magistrate decided in a court he
could do to the Areopagus and in very rare occasions,
I would imagine, the Areopagus could do
something about it, but I think what we have to
assume is that a decision by the magistrates court was it and the
game was over. Heliaia,
on the other hand, was a court of appeals;
that's critical. Anybody who didn't like the
decision that he got in a magistrates court could take it
to a heliaia and then have that decision overturned,
if the court so decided, and that court was a truly
popular court. It was open to all adult male
Athenian citizens, even the thetes.
That is something very new. Really quite radical,
the most radical element surely in this very moderate program
that Solon puts forward. Notice, he still gives the
aristocracy privileges that nobody else has in the right to
hold--I say aristocracy but I mean the richest people in the
state, in that they alone could hold
the archonship, which would have been troubling
to the poor. But then he gives this new
founded court of appeals to the poorest Athenian citizens,
which would certainly have ranked the rich and that's
characteristic of what he is up to.
This court--here's the way it worked.
Every year Athenians could volunteer to be enrolled in the
panel that would produce the courts of the heliaia,
and a number of Athenians on this panel was six thousand,
and then on any occasion when there had to be an actual court
case, then the members,
people on the enrolled list--there would be some way of
picking the numbers you needed for the jury.
We know how it worked in the Classical Period,
but we can't be sure it worked the same way in Solon's time.
But in the Classical Period, the very complicated way of
choosing jurors, which was allotment,
but such a wonderfully complicated allotment device,
that it guaranteed that nobody would know who was going to sit
on a particular jury until they walked into the room and began
to hear the case and that was to avoid corruption of a jury.
So, whether that system was in play or not,
and I don't think it was in the detail in Solon's time,
the idea should be clear. These things are really going
to be unfixable and ordinary Athenians are going to be the
ones who are making the decisions.
Later, theoreticians of politics of democracy would fix
on that as the single most important step towards the
democracy that the Athenians would ultimately reach,
but by no means would Solon's constitution,
if it had been put into effect, have amounted to a thorough
going democracy. Yet, the tradition always was
there that Solon had done something democratic,
because as you go into the fourth century,
people looking back without any real good knowledge of what went
on back in those days, some of them listed Solon as
the founder of democracy. But it's also true that the
general understanding was not wrong about this,
because there was the same tradition at the same time,
that it wasn't the same kind of democracy we have now in the
fifth century. It was less democratic;
and I think those traditions were correct but moderation
again is the example of what I'm talking about.
Well, brilliant, marvelous Solon was so clever
he realized that when you're moderate,
the wonderful achievement of a moderate person is that
everybody is dissatisfied, because the guys on that end
are unhappy and the guys that are on that end are unhappy,
and so he knew that there would immediately be efforts to
overthrow what he had done. So, one of his stipulations was
that the Athenians would have to leave his laws unchanged for ten
years, and he also knew that his own
life would be extremely uncomfortable hanging around
Athens while everybody came and said,
what the hell did you do Solon? So, he left town and went on
his travels for ten years after that.
Well, it saved him a lot of grief, but it didn't save his
legislation, because there was tremendous strife in Athens
after the year of Solon's archonship,
indeed, something resembling chaos I think.
They were technically years of anarchy;
that is to say, there was so much dispute and
conflict in Athens that they were unable to elect the nine
archons, just years with no archons,
no name for the year, that was how serious the
conflict was. What emerges in our records
about what was happening is that localism, regionalism was very
powerful in Attica and it was regionalism that was a large
part of the problem in this period.
Important figures in the aristocracy from different parts
of Attica, each sought to make himself the dominant force in
Athenian society, and to bring about changes that
were satisfactory to them, but they ran into the fact that
they had competition. To make it more complicated,
it wasn't even a nice one against one thing.
There were three factions that were identified by the Greeks,
by the Athenians and they all struggled one against the other. Let's start with the
regional character of these places.
One such region was called, the people in that faction--let
me back up. The region was called
peralia and the people who were in the faction were
called peralioi. Modern scholars identify the
peralia with the southern tip of Attica,
starting some distance up from Sunium on the west coast
carrying a little bit around to the east coast,
and that was a region that was dominated by that family I
mentioned to your earlier, the family that was held
responsible for the killing of the supporters of Cylon,
that family were the Alcmaeonidae and their leading
figure, at the moment we're talking about,
was a man called Megacles, who was one of the competitors
for the leading position in Attica.
According to the ancient writers of the fourth century,
very hard to know how much they really knew about it,
it's a matter of speculation, but anyway what they say is
these people wanted a middling moderate constitution.
They were probably very close to trying to retain the Solonian
legislation.Another faction were called the pediakoi
and they represented the middling part of Attica,
which is in fact, the very best land in Attica
where grain and wheat especially,
were growable and the richest people had their land.
Their leader was a man named Lycurgus and they represented
the old aristocracy more than any other group,
and would have undoubtedly if they had had their way,
just undone the Solonian laws, and gone back to the old days.
They favored some kind of oligarchic regime.
Then the third group lived in the region called
diakrioi and they were called diakrioi.
Sometimes some of our sources say hyperakrioi;
I'll come back to that in just a moment.
Well, I might as well tell you about it now.
It is identified with the region on the east coast of
Attica, which was called the Diakria,
but why they might have been called hyperakrioi
is that there was some mountains between central Attica and the
Diakria, which meant hyperakrioi
means beyond the mountains and that would have been a
geographical description of the region. The leader of this faction
was a man called Peisistratus who was a nobleman,
an aristocrat; all of them were,
but his family had come from the Peloponnesus back in the
years of the great migration, following the fall of the
Mycenaean world and that shows you that the Athenians had
brought into their bosoms at that time,
and made full citizens all aristocrats and leading people,
some people from outside of Attica.
Now, it was hundreds of years later and Peisistratus arose as
the leader of that place and of those people.
Now, he's going to be very important;
we need to say a few more words about him.
In the quarrel about what shall be done Peisistratus and his
group were the most radical. They represented the views of
the poorest people in Attica and pressed for solutions of the
kind that they would like. He, himself,
had arisen to power in the usual way.
He had been a great soldier and had won great victories for the
Athenians and was deeply honored for that reason,
and we'll hear more from him. Ancient writers speak of him as
the most demotic, the most popular,
the most democratic, if you will.
So, here are the three factions with their local
places, with their policies presumably,
and their different leaders all struggling for power and
sufficiently equal in strength, so that nobody could come out
on top. Out of this,
and by the way, when Solon comes home and the
situation is as unsatisfactory as I've described,
Solon becomes particularly worried about Peisistratus whom
he has spotted as potential tyrant,
and he goes out and he warns the people against Peisistratus,
but the fact of the matter is, he fails and his warnings and
his predictions turn out to be accurate, as Peisistratus does
bring about tyranny in Athens for the stretch of time that he
and his sons will dominate the place.
He was engaged in that war against Megara and was the
number one hero in that war. He was wounded and when he came
back he said that he was in danger from his enemies who were
going to try to kill him and he asked the people to supply him
with a body guard. They did so,
and he pretty quickly took the opportunity to use his body
guard to seize the Acropolis and made himself boss of Athens.
For a five-year stretch from about 561 to 556,
he was able to rule Athens. We know very little about the
details of that period, but he was a proper tyrant one
way or another. Then the two factions that were
defeated managed to get their heads together to plot and to
overthrow the tyranny to drive Peisistratus out.
So out, he goes. For a period of time he goes
abroad, wanders around, meets with other important
people, goes to see other tyrants,
and becomes friendly with other tyrants.
And he finds one way or another to make a lot of money,
and to get very rich. This is important because he is
able to use this money for hiring mercenary soldiers,
which will play a large part in his restoration,
but not the first restoration. That comes about,
because the two factions that had gotten together to drive him
out, had by now come to quarrel with
one another, and so taking advantage of their dissent,
he made a deal with one of the faction leaders.
It was our old friend Megacles, the Alcmaeonidae.
He now united with Megacles, and the two of them drove out
their opponents in the form of Lycurgus and his people,
and Peisistratus was restored to the tyranny.
What did Megacles get out of it? Well, he got guarantees that he
would be a big shot and one part of the guarantee was that
Peisistratus, who had had a wife and children
already--I assume she died, the first wife--now married the
daughter of Megacles. Time memorial,
that's the way to produce political associations;
one guy marries the one's daughter.
So, there we are. Now, the story of how
Peisistratus comes back to power in this second time is charming,
and I think we have to believe it in its general outlines.
Well, you can decide whether you want to or not.
The story is told in a couple places, but Aristotle and his
Athenian Constitution tells it in one way.
Peisistratus got a tall, beautiful girl,
and he dressed her up to look like Athena and he put her on a
chariot and had her drive through the Attica countryside
and his boys running alongside her shouted,
Athena is bringing back Peisistratus to Athens.
Well, you're not going to cross your patron deity are you?
So, you can imagine them just sort of kowtowing and saying,
hail Peisistratus, the favorite of Athena.
Well, the fact that he had a lot of soldiers and that he had
Megacles on his side undoubtedly played a large part in the
success. But there he is back,
and everything would have been all right I guess,
except that after a while Peisistratus--let me back up a
second. Peisistratus' wife,
the daughter of Megacles, began going home to her father
and mother and telling them sad stories,
which is that her husband was not performing his husbandly
duties. Why was this?
Was she particularly offensive? No, there's no such record
as that. It's clear enough that what was
worrying Peisistratus was that he did not want to mess up the
clarity of the succession of his sons to the tyranny.
If he had children with Megacles, and they grew up,
maybe they would contest the succession and so it was in his
role as a loyal and devoted father that he got himself into
all kinds of trouble. Well, Megacles felt the insult,
the fact that his grandchildren would not be in charge,
and finally, I have to believe,
even in a Greek father, feeling that his daughter had
been done wrong. So, he joined up with the
opposition, kicked out Peisistratus one more time.
In this second exile of Peisistratus,
he goes to various places to raise all kinds of money,
gets mercenaries, he is supported by--this will
play a role in later events. He gets very friendly with the
cavalrymen, the horsemen, the nobility of Eritrea,
a town in the northern part of the Island of Euboea,
just off the east coast of Attica.
By the way, remember Peisistratus comes
from that area, the east coast of Attica,
and regionalism will not disappear from Attica for some
time, and that is significant. Anyway, he gets all kinds of
help from overseas and his wealth and all that,
and this time he's just going to fight his way back.
No tricks, no goddesses. He lands at Marathon which has
the advantage to him of being very close to Euboea,
where he's been operating with his friends in Eritrea.
It also has a nice flat place for cavalry and I'm sure he
acquired cavalrymen among the mercenaries that he hired.
All of that allows him to get his forces together,
and sure enough, when he lands at Marathon,
that's his home territory and all his people come rallying
round to him and now he has a good sized army of Athenians and
mercenaries and he marches inland,
and in the middle land of Attica, the place called
Pellini, he meets his opponents and defeats them in battle,
and makes himself the tyrant of Athens once again. One of the things he does
by a trick, very soon after coming to power,
is to disarm the Athenian people,
so that he is now ruling in a truly tyrannical way in that
sense. There's not much pretense at
having achieved this position by the popular will.
He's done so by force and trickery, and he's prepared to
maintain his power in those ways.
But in his actual government of Attica and Athens in the
remainder of his life, tradition is pretty clear that
he did not rule harshly. If we think of the word
tyrannical as meaning harsh, he did not rule tyrannically.
In fact, later writers describe the way he ruled Athens,
and it's this last period that they're talking about I think,
as one that was politicos,
meaning moderately and in accordance with the way a
polis should be run, which does not include tyranny.
In fact, some later writers picture the
rule of Peisistratus as a golden age in Athens.
We'll come back to that perhaps. But there are two edges to this
thing. There's the notion,
my God he established a tyranny which later on in Athens would
be the worst thing in the world you could do and yet there's
this alongside it, this tradition of a decent
government under Peisistratus. Well, let's see what he did.
One thing he did was not to repeal the laws of Solon.
They may never have been put into full effect,
because of the turmoil but no one had ever said they're not
the law anymore. In fact, Peisistratus let them
be and, in fact, he allowed them to function as
they should. In other words,
I would think that there was a council of 400 that was elected
every year and met. We know there were magistrates,
there were archons elected in the appropriate way
each year. The law courts even met in the
way that they were supposed to, but what Peisistratus did was
not to change the constitution, but to dominate it.
I think you have to imagine that there is the rule of a
boss. He doesn't change the laws;
he just sees to it that all the appropriate bodies are
controlled by his people. That, for an analogy,
is the way the Medici governed in Florence and they made
themselves the rulers of that republic.
It is true; you can't be just totally
gentle. You have to take care of your
enemies, because they're going to be enemies out there.
So, Peisistratus surely exiled some aristocratic families,
the ones who wouldn't cut a deal with him,
the ones who wouldn't play ball;
out they went. We know that for some part of
the time, but we don't know just when.
He exiled the Alcmaeonidaes. Of course, he had this quarrel
with Megacles, so that was not a surprise and
they could not readily be made complacent to what was going on,
although we do have, and this is remarkable,
we have an actual inscription which is blatantly a list of
archons who held office in Athens after Peisistratus'
death, in the period when his sons
ruled Athens. One of the names as
archon of the city was Cleisthenes, who was an
Alcmaeonid, which means makes it perfectly
clear that at least later in the day the Alcmaeonids came back
into Attica. We have to imagine that
Peisistratus ruled this thing with great savvy and there was
always time come home, if you would be a good boy and
do what Peisistratus told you to do, and I think that happened in
many cases. One of the things he did that
was very popular was to invent the institution of circuit
judges. That is to say,
it used to be that if you were an Athenian citizen and you
wanted to go to law, originally of course you had no
choice but to go to the local big shot and have this local
aristocrat settle the matter, as had been the case in the
days of Hesiod. But under Solon's system,
at the very least, you could go to the magistrate
in Athens, if you wanted to,
and you could even appeal to his decision if you wanted too,
but here's the problem, what if you lived in Sunium?
You lived miles and miles, and miles away from this,
what were the chances that you would in fact,
or could go to the city to receive the justice that you
needed. So, by establishing circuit
justice, brought courts that were objective,
that were not dominated by the local barons,
he was doing a real service to the ordinary Athenian citizen,
and that was seen to be a good thing.
But it was also, of course, in his interest.
He doesn't want local big shots being big shots.
There's only room in a tyranny for one big shot and that is the
tyrant, and so he's serving himself,
breaking down local power, unifying the state into a
single thing, which is good in all kinds of
ways, but it's also good for the
tyrant. Now, the next thing I'm
going to say is supposition; we don't have any ancient
evidence for it, which is, of course,
open to doubt. But I would argue that he must
have confiscated some of the land of the aristocrats who
opposed him and with whom he did not make a deal.
I say that pretty much only for this reason.
Before Peisistratus we have the story of great differences in
land holding between very, very big landowners and very,
very small landowners and those who own no land at all,
producing the problem. Nothing Solon did directly
affected that situation, but when we get into the fifth
century, the evidence is overwhelming
that we have what I spoke of earlier, lots and lots of
medium, moderate family-sized farms,
some big farms, but these are not what are
characteristic of the place. Well, how did that happen?
When did that happen? My guess is probably
Peisistratus brought that about, and if so, it would have been
still another reason why he had brought popularity,
remarkable popularity. The ancient sources do tell us
that among the things that he did was to spend money on
farmers. That is, he would give money or
lend money to farmers who needed it when they needed it,
which was of course one of the issues constantly before the
small farmers of Attica. So, with the money they
borrowed, they could buy more land, and make their farm more
self-sustaining. They could pay off debts that
they owed to other people, and they could do the things
that these small farmers have to do to succeed,
namely, buy the equipment they need: olive presses,
wine presses, and mills.
They could use their loans for planting fruit trees,
olive trees. All of these things could have
been part of the story of how Athenian agriculture came to be
so successful after the time of the tyrants,
as they had not been before. Now, there's one negative thing
that I'm sure nobody liked. Peisistratus instituted the
first regular direct tax that we know of in Athenian history.
A five percent tax on all that was produced from the land and
that money went to Peisistratus, and it made him wealthy,
but also provided him with the money he needed to be this good
fellow that I have been describing.
So, it all assisted his political power and his
popularity. Tyrants laid down taxes.
Taxes are evidence of tyranny, and all that.
That's not totally the picture we get.
Aristotle tells this story, one day Peisistratus was
traveling around the countryside of Attica,
as I guess he sometimes did, and he went up on the slopes of
Mount Hymettus, not too far from the city of
Athens. You can go up there today,
the notion of anybody farming on that mountain is totally
incredible, nothing you could possibly grow
on Mount Hymettus, but it's been deforested by
that time. So anyway, it was still lousy.
I mean, mountains are not great places for farms,
you may have noticed. So anyway, he goes up to this
farmer and he says, "Say farmer what do you grow on
your farm?" The farmer, you have to imagine
a gnarled old mean, nasty old guy saying,
"On my farm I grow rocks and Peisistratus is welcome to his
five percent." Well, what did Peisistratus
say, off with his head or send him on to the moon?
He said, well, aren't you a cute little
fellow. I hereby declare your farm
exempt from taxes forever, and it became a famous thing
the tax free farm. It shows up in a Byzantine
encyclopedia; that story is still being told.
So, you got a very special kind of tyrant here.
We'll turn to the rest of his reign and that of his sons next
time.
