Persian Fire

4

ATHENS

Earth-Born

In Greece, a city was hardly a city without a bizarre foundation myth. The Spartans were far from alone in obsessing about their roots. With the anxiety of people who were always looking over their shoulders at rivals, concerned to pull rank, to put down others, to claim pre-eminence, Greeks in cities everywhere told tall stories about their past. Some were taller than others. The Argives, for instance, although Dorian, like the Spartans, and therefore similarly able to claim the bloodline of Heracles, were hardly the people to rest content with the same pedigree as their hated neighbors. Even as they were being repeatedly bested by the Spartans on the battlefield, their genealogical fantasies grew increasingly bombastic. It was an Argive woman, they boasted, who had been the ancestress of the Egyptians, the Arabs and a host of other peoples. In fact, there was barely a nation in the world that did not possess some blood link to Argos—or so the Argives liked to claim.

Extravagant pretensions of this order were not the only way to put the Spartans in their place. The citizens of Tegea, for instance, whose history boasted few famous names, could still afford to sneer at their fearsome neighbors as parvenus—for they, unlike the Dorians, had always lived in the Peloponnese. Deep roots, among the Greeks, were a sure source of prestige. The Argives, not content with swanking about their glitzy overseas connections, boasted that they, too, were natives of their homeland, and always had been. Their Dorian ancestry, which might have been thought to render this assertion problematic, was cheerfully ignored. Logic was rarely a feature of the Greeks’ foundation myths. In the Peloponnese, particularly, where there were any number of competing traditions, claims swirled amid counterclaims, and the past might easily be adapted on the hoof.

The ultimate, of course, was for an entire region to claim never to have been conquered, but always to have preserved its customs, and its liberty, from invaders. “The same ethnic stock, generation after generation, the same people, they have always lived in this, our native land—and it is they, by virtue of their merits, who have bequeathed it to us, a country eternally free.”¹ The Athenians, throughout their history, never tired of this kind of talk. No folktales of migration, of the melting pot, for them. Instead, with a smugness that other Greeks found wearisome in the extreme, they pointed to the sacrosanct quality of their borders, of how no Heraclid or Dorian had ever succeeded in forcing them, and of how, like “the wheat and the barley” that grew in the Attic fields, “the vines, the olives and the figs,”² they were earth-born, soil-sprung—“autochthonous.”

This was no metaphor, no labored conceit. To the Athenians, it was the simple, literal truth. When they trod their native land, the dusty paths that wound over the hills of Attica, her plains and rocky valleys, they knew they were as much a part of the landscape as the clumps of marjoram and heady-smelling thyme, or the meadows of spectral asphodels, beloved of the gods, or the marble that might sometimes be glimpsed through the scrub of a mountain slope. Here was a mystery profounder by far than those claimed by other Greeks when they traced fabulous bloodlines for themselves and boasted of divine descent. Indeed, it would have been blasphemy for an Athenian to pretend to any such thing. After all, the goddess whom they worshipped as their protector and from whom they took their name was Athena: the gray-eyed warrior, mistress of the arts, daughter of Wisdom—and a virgin. Not for her, sublime and enigmatic, the indignities of childbirth. No man would ever possess her. The nearest anyone had come to achieving that was when her brother Hephaestus, the crippled blacksmith of the gods, whose talents of craftsmanship were as limitless as his bandy legs were weak, had been so overcome with desire for his sister that he had hobbled after her, sweaty and soot-stained, and sought to take her in his arms. Athena, with icy contempt, had brushed him aside—but not before Hephaestus, shuddering with excitement, had ejaculated all over her thigh. Wiping the mess off with a tangle of wool, the goddess had then dropped it, still sodden, down onto Attica—where the semen, like heavy dew, had moistened the womb of Mother Earth. From this fertilizing of “the grain-giving fields” had been born a child with the coiled tail of a snake. Athena, adopting him, had named him Erechtheus.³ She had settled him on the Acropolis, “in her own wealthy temple,” and there, “to this day, with each revolving of the year, the sons of Athens offer him bulls and rams.”⁴

Hardly the kind of story that a Heraclid would promote. That the Athenians were content to ascribe the origins of their city to a discarded toss rag speaks eloquently of the significance that the myth possessed for them. Over the centuries it would be increasingly elaborated, but its roots were ancient, and reflected an equally ancient truth. The Athenians were indeed, just as they insisted, a people distinct. Whether their borders had really remained as sacrosanct as they would later claim seems improbable, but Attica, of all the regions of Greece, had certainly best weathered the storm that brought the palace of Menelaus and many other proud capitals blazing into ruin. Throughout the turmoil and obscurity of the centuries that followed, the various communities of Attica had preserved a sense of themselves as a discrete nation, united by shared customs, dialect and race. Emerging from their dark age, they were still able to recollect that they, at any rate, had never been homeless migrants, but were “the oldest people of Greece.”⁵ True, Athens, right until the seventh century BC, was, like Sparta, little more than a shabby village, huddled ingloriously around the rock of its acropolis. Nor did the people of other settlements yet think of themselves as Athenians, or even, it may be, as citizens of a single state.⁶ Yet the Acropolis itself, sheer and immense, served all the communities of Attica as a natural focus of veneration, since every valley led to it; nor was there any other Attic sanctuary that could rival its aura of mystery. Rectangles of masonry so heavy that it was evident only giants could have raised them ringed its summit in an immense wall. Ruins incalculably ancient testified to its use in former times by heroes and kings.*⁹ Sanctified by the presence of Athena, whose dwelling place it was, its rock served also as the tomb of Erechtheus, the earth-born one. So it was that all the people of Attica, not just the Athenians, could look upon the Acropolis and be reminded of the soil from which they had sprung, of the inheritance which they shared, and of the loyalty to their homeland which they owed.

The result was a regional identity unlike any other in Greece. That Athens stood dominant as the only city in the whole of Attica was, in the eyes of other Greeks, both startling and aberrant. Boeotia, an area of similar size to its neighbor, was carved up between no fewer than ten squabbling states. Argos, the most populous city in the Peloponnese, ruled a plain that was barely half the size of Attica. Only Sparta, of the Greek powers, controlled a broader swath of territory than Athens did—but hers had been won, and was held, at the point of a sword. The Athenians themselves had never attempted anything remotely as energetic. In the seventh century BC, while the Spartans were completing their pacification of Messenia and cities throughout Greece were swirling with violent currents, a visitor to Attica from Argos or Corinth would have found it a somnolent backwater. The Athenians positively shrank from dipping their toes into the flood tides of the modern. Not for them the military and political revolutions that were affecting the rest of Greece, and were transforming Sparta, in particular, into something perilous and new. Rather than submit to a similar experiment, the Athenians preferred the security of parochialism and nostalgia. In comparison to those on even the smallest Aegean islands, their temples were poky and unimpressive; their funeral practices self-consciously archaic; even their pottery, which provided employment for a full quarter of the city, and had once been the most innovative in Greece, increasingly harked back to the past. Just as the rest of the Greek world was fixing its gaze on dazzling new horizons, the Athenians seemed to be set on returning to the age of the Trojan War.⁷

And indeed, in the structure of their society, it was as though they had never really left it. Out in the fields and groves of Attica, a whole day’s journey from Athens, perhaps, or maybe more, a man might easily live less as a citizen than as a serf, as a sharecropper, paying a sixth of all he earned to a distant landlord. The landlords themselves, in the traditional manner of heroes, lived well apart from the common run, marrying into one another’s houses, parceling out magistracies to one another, and sneering at everyone else with a roistering contempt. Such was the desire for exclusivity of some aristocratic clans that they even turned their noses up at what was commonly an Athenian’s proudest boast, and would trace exotic foreign lineages for themselves from the assorted stars of the Trojan War. One family, the Pisistratids, claimed descent from a Messenian king; another, the Philaids, from Ajax, the tallest warrior to have fought on either side at Troy, and a king of Salamis, an island just off the Attic coast. Well might the Athenian nobility have awarded themselves the title “Eupatrids,” or “Well-bred.” There was no other aristocracy in Greece quite so snobbishly stuck in the past.

But the forces for change in the world beyond Athens were not easily kept at bay, and by 600 BC even the Eupatrids were starting to embrace them. Cosmopolitanism, for those with sufficient fashion sense, had long promised ready entry to an international fast set. Its members felt their truest sense of identity not with compatriots from the grubbing lower classes but with fellow sophisticates from across the entire Greek world. “I simply adore the good things of life”:⁸ a statement unimaginable upon the lips of a stern and shaggy hero, but raising no eyebrows whatsoever among those who believed that luxury held up a mirror to the gods. Even a woman, if her tastes were sufficiently elegant, her jewelry golden, her robes soft and richly dyed, might hope to glimpse and converse with the divine: “Come, rainbow-throned and immortal goddess of love, if ever in the past you heard my far-off cries and heeded them, leaving your father’s halls, travelling in your chariot of gold, your pretty sparrows bearing you swiftly upon the fluttering of their wings, down from heaven through the sky to the dark earth.”⁹ A prayer well worth raising—for pleasures, properly enjoyed, might indeed lift scales from mortal eyes, and a dinner party provide a better-ordered realm than any state. The seductions of high society, delicate and perfumed as they were, exerted on those who could afford them an almost spiritual allure. Taste as well as breeding had become the mark of the elite.

Yet what defined it also served to threaten it. The passion for luxuries, most of which had to be shipped from glamorous locations overseas, inevitably boosted the fortunes of those with their fingers in the import-export trade. Capital, which had previously been tied up almost exclusively in the estates of the nobility, grew increasingly liquid. By 600 BC, a momentous innovation was being introduced to the cities of Ionia: coinage. Over the following decades, it would cross the Aegean and begin to circulate in Greece. The aristocracy, unsurprisingly, reacted with disgust and mounting alarm. They bristled at the prospect of a businessman having the same spending power as a Eupatrid, and responded with increasingly frantic insults. “Kakoi,” they called the nouveaux riches: the “low-born,” the “unpleasant,” the “cheats.” The Kakoi themselves, however, as they could afford to do, merely shrugged their shoulders and continued to rake in the cash. After all, as a Spartan had once pointed out, back in the days of his own city’s social upheavals, “A man is nothing but the sum of what he owns.” Fitting slogan for a new and perplexing age. “Gold is the only thing that makes for breeding now.” So, with a curling of the lip, might the déclassé nobleman complain. “There is no other basis of esteem.”¹⁰

The Spartans themselves, of course, once so convulsed by precisely such complaints, had long since evolved their own remedy. To many, in the Attica of the 590s BC, it must have seemed as though history were repeating itself. Once again, just as in Lacedaemon a century previously, a whole region of Greece was crippled by an agrarian crisis. Never before had the property market been so fluid. As impoverished noblemen, threatened with the loss of their patrimony, tightened the screws on their tenants, so misery was passed down the food chain to the very poorest, from the mansions of great families to the barest, rockiest plots. Creditors, mapping the limits of mortgaged olive groves and fields, filled the countryside with ominous lines of stones. They might just as well have been marking out the graves of ruined peasants.

As it worsened, the land famine drew an inevitable recourse. Just over the straits from southern Attica, temptingly, indeed irresistibly, close, lay the island of Salamis. Athenian scholars, adducing complex arguments from ancient epics, were able to demonstrate, at least to their own satisfaction, that Ajax’s old kingdom belonged to them. News, certainly, to the citizens of Megara, a small city midway between Athens and Corinth, which also laid claim to Salamis, and indeed had planted it with settlers. The two cities duly went to war. Athens was defeated and forced to sue for peace. All the more galling for the vanquished was the fact that Megara, tiny as she was, ranked only as a third-rate power. The Athenians plunged into a gloomy introspection. Racked by crisis at home, humiliated abroad, they could no longer deny that they were punching woefully below their weight. Something was rotten in the state of Athens.

Spectral figures began to be glimpsed on the streets of the city, seeming portents of imminent ruin. So desperate did the situation appear that the Athenians, with that Greek enthusiasm for one-man think tanks best exemplified by the tales told of Lycurgus, began to cast around for a sage. Fortunately for them, a ready candidate was at hand. In 594 BC,¹¹ Solon, universally held to be the wisest man in Athens (not to mention one of the seven wisest Greeks who had ever lived), was given the archonship, the city’s supreme magistracy, and entrusted with the task of saving the state. His appointment, remarkably in a society as class-riven as Athens’, met with universal applause. The blue-blooded descendant of an ancient Attic king, Solon had also dabbled in trade, while simultaneously letting slip to the poor his sense of outrage at their plight. Here was a man who could appeal to all his constituencies.

Skilled though he was at tailoring his pitch to his audience, however, Solon was no mere idle trimmer. His brand of wisdom was of a peculiarly muscular variety. It was he, only a year before becoming archon, who had rallied Greek opinion to the defense of Delphi when the impious city of Crisa had sought to annex the oracle. His own city’s defeat by Megara had inspired him to even greater heights of outrage. “Let’s head for Salamis,” he had urged in impassioned verse, “fight for that beautiful island, wipe ourselves clean of the disgrace.”¹² Now, as head of state, he was in a position to do more than sloganeer. It was evident to Solon that the two great crises facing Athens, agrarian and military, both sprang from the same root: rural impoverishment was enfeebling the reserves of Attic manpower; farmers were sinking ever deeper into serfdom. The poor, if truly desperate, might even stake their freedom against their debts, perhaps ending up chained and shackled as slaves in their own fields. Solon, had he displayed the calculating mercilessness of a Lycurgus, could easily have sponsored this trend, and condemned his city’s poor to a permanent helotage. Instead, he chose to redeem them. Even those who had been sold abroad, even those “who had forgotten how to speak the Attic dialect,” were liberated, while in Attica itself, wherever property had been mortgaged, Solon ordered a general pardoning of debts. Out in the fields, men were set to work “digging up the boundary-stones where they had been set in the dark earth.”¹³

Most landlords, naturally enough, were outraged; but Solon, playing the selfless sage to the hilt, argued sternly that his reforms were in their interests, too. After all, without the bedrock provided by a free peasantry, what hope was there of capturing Salamis, or of preserving Athens from social meltdown, or of winning for the city a rank commensurate with her size? Yes, Solon had sought to ease the sufferings of the poor—but he had also labored hard to keep the rich in power. The Eupatrids, holding their noses, had duly been persuaded into an alliance with the Kakoi; wealth rather than birth made the prerequisite for office; the poor, although granted membership of a citizens’ assembly, denied the privilege of speaking in it. It was a triumph not for revolution but for a hard-fought middle way. “Envied for their wealth though they were,” Solon pointed out, “I sought to preserve the powerful from the hatred of the oppressed. Taking my stand, I used my strong shield to protect both sides of the class divide, allowing neither to gain an advantage over the other that would be unjust.”¹⁴

The boast, in short, of an instinctive centrist. Solon’s watchword was the traditional one of eunomia: that familiar Greek dream of a just and natural order, one in which all would know their place, and “rough edges would be smoothed out, appetites tamed, and presumption curbed.”¹⁵ What was such an ideal, after all, if not the birthright of the earth-sprung Athenian people? Far from launching a novel political experiment, Solon saw himself as engaged in an act of restoration and repair. With a talent for reinventing history that would have done credit to a Spartan, he persuaded his city that the constitution he had drafted was in fact the very one she had possessed in her distant past. Copies of his laws, inscribed in public on revolving wooden tablets, served to spell this out to every class of citizen. To the poor, they guaranteed freedom and legal recourse against the abuses of the powerful; to the rich, they gave exclusive right to magistracies and the running of the city. What could be fairer, more natural, more traditional, than that?

Before relinquishing power and departing Athens for a ten-year Mediterranean cruise,*¹⁰ Solon decreed that his laws should remain in force for a minimum of a century. No sooner had he set sail, however, than familiar problems began to raise their ugly heads. Eunomia was not as easily maintained in Athens as the departed Solon had cared to hope. Their powers left untrammeled, the nobility swaggered and feuded just as they had always done. Beyond Athens herself, Attica remained a patchwork of rival loyalties and clans. The war for Salamis, although it scored some successes, continued to drag on. Despite all Solon’s efforts, Athens remained very much the sick man of Greece.

Even so, his reforms had set in motion something momentous. Moved by the legends of his city, and by her claims to antiquity and to the favor of the gods, Solon had taken for granted that here was a heritage upon which every Athenian had a claim. Scandalized at the sight of his countrymen laboring in bondage amid the dust from which their ancestors had sprung, he had ordered their chains struck off. There could be no doubting, from that moment on, who was an Athenian and who was not. Nothing, of course, like the spectacle of another’s servitude to boost one’s self-esteem: thanks to Solon, even the poorest peasant could now look down upon a slave, and know himself to be as free as the haughtiest Eupatrid. Admittedly, he was not as much of a citizen; how could he be when he was barred from standing for office or making his voice heard in debate? Yet the rich, even though they still hugged political power to themselves, could not entirely afford to ignore him and his fellows. The poor may have been silent in the Assembly—but not without a vote. “For in their hands lay the power to elect officials, and to review their performances—and indeed, had the people been denied even this privilege, then they would still have ranked as little more than slaves.”¹⁶

Clearly, a new and intriguing cross-current had been added to the endless swirl of aristocratic rivalries. How best to negotiate it was a challenge that every ambitious nobleman would henceforward have to meet. There was certainly no call for him to kowtow to the poor—the very idea would have been ludicrous!—but success or failure, even for a Eupatrid, might now depend on a show of hands. Tanners, carpenters, farmhands, potters, blacksmiths: any or all of these might come to the Assembly to use their votes. Even as they continued to make policy in the closed rooms of their mansions, the elite could not afford entirely to forget where sovereignty now resided. As befitted a city with earth-sprung origins, it lay not only with the Eupatrids, nor even with the rich alone, but with the Assembly of all the Athenians, with the people—with the “demos.”

I Capture the Acropolis

It was no surprise that Athena should have chosen the Acropolis as her residence. For a start, there was the view. Five hundred feet above the rest of Athens, even a mortal could see for miles around. To the south, an hour’s walk away, lay Phalerum, the open bay which served the Athenians as their port; to the west, blocking off the view of Salamis, the peak of Mount Aigaleos; to the northeast another mountain, Pentelikon, where workmen from Athens would travel to quarry marble, gashing its slopes with scars. To a goddess, of course, shimmering through the brightness of the sky, this would have presented no obstruction; but to mortals, road-bound, it was altogether more of a challenge. Two trails circumvented the mountain, one winding northward, the other circling south. Noblemen, in particular, heading out from Athens, were frequent travelers on the loop around Pentelikon—for beyond it, level and beach-fringed, lay the perfect location for one of the aristocracy’s favorite sports. Horses and their trainers flourished at Marathon.

But the steepling heights of the Acropolis afforded more than a view alone. Down beyond its cliffs, in the cramped and booming city, the narrow alleyways were no fitting home for a goddess. Unpaved, often rocky, and invariably encrusted with filth, the streets of Athens wound and twisted without plan. Dogs and chickens, goats and pigs and cows, all of them added to the stench—and to the fleas. Carts, rumbling and creaking along specially scored grooves, added to the noise. Athens, by the 560s BC, had long since stopped stewing in her own backwardness. There were always wagons in the city, piled high with wares, and especially pottery, for in ceramics Athenian craftsmen now led the world. One area of the city was even named after it—although, in truth, the Ceramicus was just as famous for its cemetery and cheap whores.

How very much more elevated, then, in every sense, were the heights of the Acropolis. The bare rock left no doubt as to their sanctity. There, growing from the stone, rose the primal olive tree, gift of Athena and as old as Athens herself. Indeed, it was said to be immortal; but the Athenians, playing safe, and naturally not wishing to see it stripped bare of its foliage, had elected to ban goats from the hill; all save one, once a year, which would be led up to the summit and offered in sacrifice to the gods. Indeed, only a single creature was permitted on the sacred rock: a serpent. This lived in an enclosure near the tomb of Erechtheus, the snake-tailed, earth-born first citizen of Athens, where priestesses would lovingly feed it honey cakes. Men whispered that if it vanished, then the city was doomed to fall.

Yet that the snake was content to reside on the Acropolis at all could be reckoned a miracle. Sanctified it might be, yet it was hardly a place of calm. For years, it had been a permanent building site. Around 575 BC, a great stone ramp, some 250 feet in length, had been pile-driven up to the gateway of the ancient citadel, permanently improving access to the summit—and the workmen had promptly moved in. Over the following years, the hammering had never stopped. What had previously been a jumble of primitive ruins was transformed into a shrine as spectacular as any in Greece. Not only masonry, but statues of every conceivable size crowded the summit: those of young men with snail-shell curls and mocking smiles; of dimpled maidens with falling tresses, pleated cloaks and skin-tight gowns; of gorgons, luridly painted; of prancing horses and snarling lions. In images such as these, faint, perhaps, but unmistakable, could be caught a glimpse of the influence of the East, fabulous and rarefied, the home of unimaginably rich and mighty kings. The days of provincialism, in short, were well and truly over. There was nothing remotely inward-looking about the Athenians’ sanctuary now.

Except that none of the work was actually done in the name of the Athenians. Far from signaling an outbreak of civic harmony, the dust-clouds on the Acropolis conveyed precisely the opposite message. Every building project was the gift of a different clan. What better way, after all, for a Eupatrid to show off than to adorn the city’s skyline? To excel was, for a nobleman, not merely to cut a political dash but to emulate the age of heroes, to mimic the deathless gods. “Always be the bravest,” warriors in the Trojan War had been admonished. “Always be the best.”¹⁷ Centuries later, this was a message that an aristocrat still drank in with his milk. For the upper classes across the whole Greek world, it served as a virtual manifesto. This was why, if a partiality for dinner parties was one mark of the cosmopolitan elite, then another distinguishing feature had become, during the seventh century BC, a relish for sport: spectacular contests of stamina and skill, in which the jeunesse dorée, glistening and gym-perfected, would compete with their fellow noblemen for public glory. True, the first victor at the Olympic Games was said to have been a cook, and an occasional goatherd might still sneak a fairy-tale victory, but in general only those with time and money could afford to put in the ten months’ training officially required by the rules. By the first half of the sixth century, the games at Olympia had been supplemented by a whole circuit of other festivals, so competitors might, and often did, spend year after year on the road, sculpting and toning their bodies, schmoozing with other members of the Greek world’s crème de la crème. In 566 BC, even the Athenians, who in the previous century had been defiantly sniffy about the Olympics, got in on the act. A magnificent festival in honor of Athena, the Great Panathenaea, was inaugurated in their city, at which the prizes included, as well as glory, a huge amphora of olive oil. Grands projets on the Acropolis, an athlete’s trophies: both spoke of “the sweetness” that was “triumph and wondrous fame.”¹⁸

Yet the applause was not universal. Glamour and self-glorification might be all very well at Olympia, but not, say, for hoplites advancing into battle. It was notable that the Spartans, raised as they were to subordinate their individuality to a collective, were the only people in Greece to play team games; notable also that they displayed a marked ambivalence toward their Olympic athletes. A competitor from elsewhere in Greece who won first prize at the Games might expect to have statues raised in his honor, or receive a bounty, or even breach a section of his native city’s walls, “to convey,” so it was said, “that a state with such a citizen hardly had need of fortifications.”¹⁹ No such nonsense for the Spartans—not least because they had no city walls to pull down in the first place. Naturally, since their prestige was at stake, their athletes were expected to compete and win at Olympia, but memorials to their victories, back at Sparta, were conspicuous by their absence. The returning champions themselves were granted no reward save the distinctly hazardous one of a posting to the front line of battle, directly before the king.

For always, with the exceptional, with the godlike, there was menace. There rose, in the universe of things, a scale of perfection, towering like Mount Olympus, with the immortals on the summit, and mortals down in the foothills, eternally looking to climb higher. But it was perilous for a man to reach too far. The dangers that resulted might plunge not only the hero but all who knew him—indeed, all his city—into ruin. That the Athenians, for instance, back in the days of their insularity, were not being merely provincial in their suspicion of international athletics had been amply demonstrated by the fate of Cylon, a Eupatrid, and one of their few Olympic stars. The champion, returning home with his victor’s olive crown, had eventually grown so puffed up with conceit that he had dared, in 632 BC, to occupy the Acropolis and proclaim himself master of Athens. The scandalized city had been plunged into street fighting. Cylon and his followers had found themselves barricaded on the hill; they had sought sanctuary in a temple; granted a promise of free passage by the archon, they had duly emerged, only to be stoned and put to death.²⁰ A salutary lesson on the bitter fruits of setting one’s sights too high.

Except that in states more in tune with the modern than Athens, men such as Cylon had already proved themselves vanguards of the future. There were few leading cities anywhere in the Greek world that did not at some point during the seventh and sixth centuries BC fall into the hands of a high-aiming strongman—with Sparta, as ever, the exception that proved the rule. “Tyrannides,” the Greeks called such regimes—“tyrannies.” For them, the term did not have remotely the bloodstained connotations that the English word “tyrant” has for us. Indeed, a Greek tyrant, almost by definition, had to have the popular touch, since otherwise he could not hope to cling to power for long. Trumpets, slogans and public works: such were the enthusiasms he would invariably parade. He would also be expected to provide, to a people that might have been racked by faction-fighting for decades, the stamp of firm government—at the very least. Most provided a good deal more: Periander, a celebrated tyrant of Corinth, for instance, proved so consummate a statesman that he was remembered, along with Solon, as one of the seven sages of Greece.*¹¹ Naturally, in exchange for granting his fellow citizens the blessings of order and prosperity, a tyrant could be expected to make a few demands of his own. He might require that certain illegal measures, certain regrettable precautions, be overlooked: bodyguards, for instance; controls on free speech; the occasional midnight knocking on doors.

It was the tyrant’s own peers, of course, who would wince most painfully at these humiliations. Few greater torments could be imagined for an aristocrat than to endure a tyranny: the equivalent of watching a single champion win every race, year after year. No wonder that Megacles, the archon who had tricked Cylon’s followers from their temple sanctuary to their deaths, had been willing to risk the taint of sacrilege—for he had been head of the Alcmaeonids, one of the grandest of all Athenian clans, descended from a king, proud and high-aspiring, and certainly no man’s slave. And, to be sure, the penalty he and all his family paid had been a terrible one. Even in defense of freedom, a crime such as Megacles had committed against the gods could not be readily forgiven. It had taken a full thirty years of furious foot-dragging by the Alcmaeonids before they were finally brought to court; but Megacles’ clan, in the end, around 600 BC, had all been sentenced to exile in perpetuity.²¹ The moldering bones of their ancestors had been dug up and dumped beyond the borders of the city. The Alcmaeonids had become a family accursed.

But even absent from Athens, they continued to cast a long and glamorous shadow. Indeed, if anything, the curse only contributed to their menacing allure. It was typical of the Alcmaeonids’ cool effrontery that the moment they were exiled they entered into a hugely profitable relationship of mutual back-scratching with—of all people—the priests at Delphi. Megacles’ son Alcmaeon, displaying a particularly shameless aptitude for hypocrisy, led the campaign against the sacrilegious city of Crisa. He then successfully wangled himself into serving as the middleman between the grateful oracle and King Croesus, and reaped fabulous rewards—for Croesus was so pleased with his agent’s diplomacy that he invited him to visit the royal treasury in Sardis and take away all the gold that he could carry.²² Alcmaeon capitalized on this offer, it was said, by wearing a baggy woman’s tunic and the loosest boots that he could find, and then filling them with gold dust; so that “when he came staggering out, he could scarcely drag one foot after the other, his tunic bulged obscenely, and even his cheeks were stuffed full to bursting.”²³

Still the Alcmaeonids’ gaze remained fixed longingly on their native city, even though the view by the 560s BC had become an increasingly discouraging one. Athens in that decade seemed firmly under the thumb of a Eupatrid of immense hauteur, Lycurgus, head of the Boutads, a clan of such impeccable breeding that it could claim descent from the brother of Erechtheus himself. This bloodline provided Lycurgus with an almost proprietary claim on the Acropolis—a perk which, with the eye of a natural impresario, he had exploited to the full. Lycurgus, almost certainly, had been responsible for the construction of the massive ramp leading to the summit, and for the inauguration of the city’s premier new festival, the Great Panathenaea. Indisputably, he officiated in the most venerable temple on the entire Acropolis, that of Athena Polias, the “Guardian of the City.”²⁴ Modest and old fashioned this shrine may have been, but it contained within its murk an object of incalculable holiness: a statue that had fallen from the sky in far-off times, a self-portrait fashioned out of olive wood by Athena herself.²⁵ Ramp, festival, idol: Lycurgus’ fingerprints were over them all. Staged for the first time in 566 BC, and then every four years after that, whenever the Great Panathenaea was held, a great procession would climb the ramp to the temple of Athena and present to the statue, which was already wearing around its neck a golden gorgon’s head, a beautifully embroidered robe, woven by the noblest maidens of the city. Hoplites and cavalrymen, venerable elders and young girls, even foreigners resident in the city, all would take their places in the spectacular cavalcade. A show, in short, that provided the Boutads with publicity to die for.

Not that Lycurgus was the only headline act in the 560s BC. Amid all the excitement of the festivities back in Athens, a general by the name of Pisistratus was at last bringing to an end the running embarrassment of the war for Salamis. Although he certainly did not lack for connections—he was even said to have been Solon’s beloved as a boy—Pisistratus had no illusions that he could challenge the Boutads when it came to snob appeal. By the end of the decade, however, with Megara defeated and Salamis at last securely in Athenian hands, he had fostered a formidable prestige. Not merely a war hero, Pisistratus was also a charmer and a schemer, blessed with the popular touch, and possessed of a rare eye for the opportunities created by Solon’s reforms. Having first cast himself as the spokesman for the poorest of the rural poor, he then faked a dramatic assault upon himself, and appealed to the Assembly for bodyguards. Despite the lucubrations of Solon, his by now ancient former lover, who emerged from retirement to warn banefully of a looming tyranny, Pisistratus was given what he had requested—and promptly occupied the Acropolis.

The Alcmaeonids, still in exile, but sniffing the air, now suddenly smelled their chance. Feelers were put out to the Boutads; Lycurgus, stunned by the coup into a dramatic reappraisal of his objections to an Alcmaeonid return, found himself hurriedly swallowing them. A rapprochement between the two great clans was duly concocted. Against such a heavyweight pairing, there was little that Pisistratus could do. His position began to crumble by the day. Rather than make a doomed stand, as Cylon had done, he opted to cut his losses and flee into exile.

Perhaps, however, amid the seeming ruin of all his hopes, Pisistratus was able to reassure himself that his time would come again. He must have calculated that the Alcmaeonids—devious, arrogant and obscenely wealthy—would hardly make easy partners for anyone. Whatever the precise terms of their agreement with Lycurgus, it appeared unlikely that they would rest content with playing second fiddle to him for long. And, sure enough, no sooner had they returned to Athens than the Alcmaeonids were fixing their calculating gaze upon that natural stage for self-advertisement, the Acropolis, and tapping their reserves of Lydian gold. It appears probable, at the very least, that an immense stone temple raised around this time, and the first of such a scale built on the Acropolis, was the work of the Alcmaeonids.²⁶ Who else would have had the resources—or the motive—to sponsor such a project? Lavishly decorated, with brightly painted snakes, and bulls, and lions, with fish-tailed Tritons, and triple-bodied men with trim blue beards, the temple could hardly have been a more flamboyant statement of intent. Certainly, it put the shabby old shrine of Athena Polias, and the Boutads with it, thoroughly in the shade.

But new, in the opinion of the Athenians, was not necessarily best. The Alcmaeonids’ temple may have been spectacular, but it lacked what gave the older shrine its peculiar sanctity: the presence of Athena herself. By the mid-550s, as the relationship between Alcmaeonids and Boutads turned increasingly bitter, the former were beginning to cast around for a fresh way to trump Lycurgus, and claim the favor of Athena for themselves. They found it, with a fine display of opportunism, in alliance with the very man they had driven into exile barely five years previously—and the concoction of a wonderfully far-fetched plot. First, to cement the dynastic alliance, Pisistratus was obliged to separate from his wife, a blue-blooded Argive by the name of Timonassa, and marry into the Alcmaeonid clan. Next, returning to Attica, he headed to a village just south of Mount Pentelikon. A flower-seller lived there, a towering woman of exceptional beauty, with the apt name of Phye—“Stature.” Pisistratus, adorning this peasant woman with the helmet and armor of Athena and placing her in a chariot, had her driven on the road that led to Athens, with messengers going before them both, proclaiming that the goddess was leading her favorite in person to the Acropolis. An outrageous stunt—but Pisistratus somehow pulled it off. No one thought to laugh at the procession; rather, all flocked to gawk at it. To many Athenians, awestruck by the spectacle of a goddess riding through the streets of their city, it seemed a magical and wondrous epiphany; to others, watching as the chariot wound its way to the Acropolis, a dazzling piece of theater. After all, not even that consummate showman Lycurgus had thought to have Athena appear in person to grace his temple. The Alcmaeonids had, in every sense, pulled off a coup.

And Pisistratus, having captured the Acropolis a second time, had already outlived his usefulness to them. Smoothly stabbing their in-law in the back, the Alcmaeonids began to circulate a shocking rumor.²⁷ Not only, it was whispered, had Pisistratus been denying his wife the pleasures that were the due of any bride; he had also, like the monster he self-evidently was, been sating his own desires upon her purebred body in loathsome and unnatural ways. Family honor, once Athens was buzzing with the scandal, positively obliged the Alcmaeonids to turn on their erstwhile partner; even if it meant building bridges with Lycurgus, their erstwhile foe. Pisistratus, once again confronted by an alliance of the city’s two most powerful families, retreated hurriedly into a second ignominious exile. Athens was left, as before, in the hands of the Alcmaeonids and the Boutads. This time, however, there could be no doubt as to which was the preeminent clan.

But in double-crossing Pisistratus, the Alcmaeonids had sorely underestimated their man. Indeed, by using him and then dropping him in so perfidious a manner, they had provided him with an invaluable master class in the darker political arts. Pisistratus, over the next decade, would show that he had learned the lesson well. Somehow persuading the jilted Timonassa to return to him, he also succeeded in patching up his friendship with her relatives back in Argos. Wealthy backers in Thebes were similarly charmed into giving him sponsorship. A fortune was raised, and an invasion force recruited. By 546 BC, Pisistratus was ready. He and his men landed on the shallow beaches at Marathon. Here he was assured of a warm welcome—for the Pisistratids had always had close family links with the villages on the plain. The Alcmaeonids appear not to have been unduly alarmed. Taking the southern road around Mount Pentelikon, they led an army in a desultory manner as far as the village of Pallene. There, in a manner that spoke loudly of their contempt for their former stooge, they halted to have their lunch, even though Pisistratus was closing in. The engagement, when it came, was a rout: the Athenians, surprised mid-snack by an army that included both Theban cavalry and a thousand crack Argive hoplites, turned and fled in a rabble back to Athens. Left behind in the dust of Pallene lay at least one Alcmaeonid, killed “in the front line of battle.”²⁸ The surviving members of the family, rather than returning with their defeated army to Athens, there to await the vengeance of Pisistratus, fled across the Attic border—exiles once again.

Pisistratus himself, meanwhile, relishing his triumph, continued his advance on Athens. It hardly needed a goddess now to proclaim him her favorite. Once again he climbed the great ramp that led to the Acropolis and took possession of the summit. Surpassingly gracious, Pisistratus then informed his fellow citizens “that they should not be alarmed or downcast, but should go and attend to their private business, leaving all the burdens of state for him to shoulder.”²⁹ The Athenians, in acknowledgment of their submission, turned and did as their new master had instructed, reckoning—and relieved, perhaps—that this time the tyrant was surely there to stay.

Drama out of a Crisis

And so it proved. No more foreign travels for Pisistratus. With a silky ruthlessness that showed he had nothing left to learn now from the exiled Alcmaeonids, he alternately menaced and lulled his fellow Eupatrids into an unprecedented docility. The children of prominent rivals were packed off as hostages to the Aegean island of Naxos. Slaves from the steppes of Scythia, a savage wilderness far to the north of Greece, appeared suddenly on patrol in the streets, an alarming sight for any citizen, armed as the police squads were with bows and arrows, and wearing outlandish pointed caps. Competitive building on the Acropolis, now that there was only the one show in town, slowly ground to a halt. Yet Pisistratus, even as he kept the city’s richest pickings for himself, was careful also to throw his rivals the occasional juicy scrap: a magistracy, perhaps, or an overseas command.

Even the grandest were content to accept his patronage. Miltiades, for instance, head of the Philaids, was given permission to lead an expedition across the Aegean to the Hellespont, the narrow strait which divides Asia from Europe, and is known today as the Dardanelles. Miltiades, relieved to be able to spread his wings, enthusiastically seized his chance. Arriving in the Hellespont, he landed on the Chersonese, the thin peninsula which forms the European bank of the strait, and from which access to the Black Sea, and its corn-gold shores, could easily be controlled. There he threw himself into a brisk war of pacification, not only against the natives, but against any Greek colonists already established there who might presume to stand in his way. Then, with his authority firmly established over the whole peninsula, he settled down, with Pisistratus’ blessing, to establish a tyranny of his own. This left everyone—the hapless victims of his campaigns aside, of course—a winner. Certainly, no news could have been better designed to gladden Athenian hearts. Attica, with its thin soil and booming population, had long since outgrown self-sufficiency, and the dread of starvation, even as Athens prospered, was never far away. To Pisistratus, the man who could boast of having sent Miltiades to the Chersonese, and thereby securing it for the Athenian people, immense gratitude was naturally due. The tyrant himself—who had succeeded in keeping his fellow citizens in bread, secured a vital trade route for Athenian business and disposed of a potentially dangerous rival, all with one deft move—could reflect with satisfaction on a job well done.

This killing of multiple birds with a single, well-directed stone was a classic Pisistratid throw. Why, after all, rest content with neutralizing the Eupatrids when there were businessmen, potters and farmers to woo as well? Solon, years previously, had dared to ask an identical question—but he had shrunk in horror from the answer. “Only hand another man the goad I was given,” he had warned with grim self-satisfaction, “someone unscrupulous and on the make, and you will see how he lets the mob run wild.”³⁰ Solon had spoken with the moral authority of a man who had spurned the temptations of tyranny; but Pisistratus, despite having wholeheartedly surrendered to them, could claim with some justification that he was only following his old lover’s middle way. If his manipulation of aristocratic rivals owed much to a path already blazed by the Alcmaeonids, then he was, in his concern for the demos, just as obviously drawing on the example of Solon himself. This was why, autocrat though Pisistratus undoubtedly was, his scrupulous show of respect for the Assembly—“like a citizen rather than a tyrant,”³¹ observers said—was more than mere spin. Not for him the nose-wrinkling of his fellow Eupatrids as they deigned to curry favor with stinking laborers or tradesmen. Pisistratus actively courted popular enthusiasm for his regime. He would tirelessly tour the countryside, pressing the flesh of the humblest fieldhands, bringing justice to the remotest croft, “so that those with complaints would not have to travel all the way to Athens, and get behind with their business.”³² Meanwhile, back in the city itself, builders were set to work on the construction of a spectacular new square at the foot of the Acropolis, one that would soon sound to fresh water, bubbling from nine fountains, and gleam with the brilliance of freshly chiseled marble. How could any Athenian, gawking at such unexampled scenes, have any doubts about the tyrant’s greatness or his beneficence? Athens truly seemed to have entered “a golden age.”³³

There was certainly little enthusiasm for any talk of liberty. In the spring of 527 BC, when Pisistratus finally passed away peacefully in his own bed, his two sons, Hippias and Hipparchus, succeeded without challenge to his nineteen-year reign of peace. An ambassador of the Persian king, should one have been sent to attend to the business of so remote and obscure a city, would have had no difficulty in identifying the form of government that appeared to prevail in Athens—and to be sure, in the character of the two brothers’ reign there was indeed a whiff of monarchy. Their tastes, to a degree exceptional even by the standards of their father, ran to the monumental. Any citizen who doubted that had only to look to the southeast of Athens, yet another scene of hammering and chiseling, where the Pisistratids, not content with the ongoing beautification of their father’s magnificent square, had embarked upon an even more ambitious showcase: a temple to Zeus so breathtakingly vast that philosophers, goggling at the site centuries later, would compare it to the pyramids.

But Hippias and Hipparchus were no pharaohs. Showy though their building projects were, they actually held no formal rank within the city at all. Just as the site on which the great columns of their temple were being erected was an ancient one, long sacred to Zeus, so the Pisistratids themselves, confronted by the natural conservatism of their fellow citizens, had felt it best to root their authority in the subsoil of tradition. It was one thing for them to indulge in the enthusiasm for architecture that had always been expected of the upwardly mobile Eupatrid, but it was quite another to flaunt the basis and true character of their power. If rivals proved obdurate, they were best murdered on the quiet. What went on behind closed doors, in darkened cellars, could hardly be boasted of in public. The Pisistratids had to veil as well as publicize their tyranny.

Decorously, therefore, they concealed the nakedness of their supremacy behind the veil of Solon’s constitution. Candidates from families other than the Pisistratids continued to be permitted to run for the archonship. Most, of course, were the tyrants’ placemen—most, but by no means all. Two, in particular, would have leapt out at anybody scanning a list of the city’s archons. One of these, startlingly, was a Miltiades: not the adventurer who had been a contemporary of Pisistratus, but his nephew, recently emerged as head of the Philaids, and would-be tyrant of the Chersonese himself. Just above him was an even bigger jaw-dropper: an Alcmaeonid, no less, one Cleisthenes, restored both to Athens and to her highest office by the favor of the tyrants. Who could doubt, seeing the former exile on the archon list, the legitimacy of the regime that had put him there? Who doubt, when even the most implacable enemy of the tyranny appeared content to adorn it, that the brothers were there to stay?

Yet it was possible to interpret the return of Cleisthenes in a very different light. Could the Alcmaeonids, those inveterate back-stabbers, really have buried the hatchet? To rely upon their good faith was certainly a gamble. Sure enough, soon after Cleisthenes had served his term of office, he overplayed his hand and was forced back into exile.³⁴ This could be viewed as a victory for the Pisistratids—but it was a peculiarly perilous one. The source of their legitimacy, after all, was their ability to keep peace and public order. Descend to faction-fighting and their grip on power would start to slip. While they could hardly permit popular unrest, neither, awkwardly, could they risk indulging in too much of the repression that might stem it. Seen in such a light, even the temple of Zeus might appear less a monument to their self-confidence than a colossal bluff.

And in truth, such illusions were the hallmark of the regime. Look one way, and Athens might indeed appear a monarchy. Look another and something very different. The citizen inspecting the archon list, if he turned eastward, would see, along the margin of the open space, the glint of money changing hands, and hear the clamor of business—for the square, that imperious exercise in Pisistratid self-promotion, was already being colonized by commerce. Merchants had grown fat on the tyranny. Silver weighed heavy on counting tables all over the city, coins standardized, it seems likely, by the Pisistratids themselves, stamped on one side with Athena and on the other with her sacred owl—a currency so pure that already it had come to rank among the strongest of any city’s. But if it had served to make the rich more of a force to be reckoned with than ever, it had also raised the profile of those on whom big business depended, whether the potters of the Ceramicus or the farmers who supplied the olive presses. Hippias and Hipparchus, like their father, courted them all. Every class in Athens was wooed and flattered somehow. Just as the archons were encouraged to pretend that the constitution was something more than a glorified sham, so the people were still cast as citizens who were sovereign, earth-born, free. Potters and farmers, told that often enough, might even end up believing it. Such a delusion naturally served the tyrants’ own purposes well. Actors rarely appear more authentic than when convinced of the reality of their parts.

Of the many memorials raised by the tyranny to itself, then, perhaps the most fitting was not the temple of Zeus, nor any other grand projet, but rather an addiction among the Athenians to the wearing of masks, the mouthing of scripts and the playing of roles. Later generations, looking back to the mysterious birth of tragedy, would have no hesitation in attributing to the tyrants’ original patronage a prestigious new festival, the City Dionysia, which had as its centerpiece a contest between rival tragedians—nor in imagining what the motive for such sponsorship might have been. After all, “only allow ourselves to praise and honour make-believe,” as Solon was said to have warned, “and the next thing will be to find it creeping into the very business of state.”³⁵ Which was, of course, for the Pisistratids, precisely the appeal.

Yet they too, lost in a hall of mirrors of their own making, appear sometimes to have longed for a guiding hand. How best to find one in a city in which the boundaries between fantasy and fact, propaganda and truth, had grown so blurred was naturally a challenge. Fearful of overreliance on any human agency, the two brothers opted instead to put their faith in the supernatural. Hippias, it was said, “had a deeper understanding of oracles than any other man living,”³⁶ and together with his brother sponsored a vast archive of prophecies, which they hoarded lovingly on the Acropolis. When Hipparchus discovered that the archivist, an intimate of his by the name of Onomacritus, had been doctoring them, the tyrant was so upset that he banished his friend on the spot. Intelligence, after all, was only ever as good as its source. Bearing this in mind, the two brothers placed a particular reliance upon their own dreams—and to such effect that they ruled their city without challenge for thirteen years.

Then, one blazing night in the summer of 514 BC, on the eve of the Great Panathenaea, Hipparchus had a vision that he failed to understand. A young and very beautiful man spoke to him from beside his bed, warning him in the urgent and cryptic manner of dreams that crimes must always be paid for. Hipparchus, waking with a jolt, would surely have devoted himself to identifying the offense he might have committed and making amends—but it was the morning of the Great Panathenaea and he did not have the time. Instead, leaving his home, he hurried across his father’s square, heading for the Ceramicus, where his brother was organizing the great procession that would soon be departing for the Acropolis. As he passed a temple on the edge of the square, Hipparchus saw two men he recognized pushing their way toward him. Perhaps then, too late, he made sudden sense of his dream. For the two men were coming to murder him. One, Harmodius, was the handsomest man in Athens, “in the full splendour of his youth,”³⁷ while the other, Aristogiton, was his lover—and Hipparchus, who had an aesthete’s eye for beauty, had attempted to split the couple for his own predatory ends, and thereby mortally offended them both. Dreading the power of the tyrant, and knowing that they had no other recourse, the two lovers had been biding their time, waiting until a festival such as the Panathenaea, at which everyone wore swords, when they would have their chance. Now, with Hipparchus before them, and with his bodyguards distracted by the crowds, they cut him down.

That was the limit of their conspiracy. Harmodius himself was killed on the spot; Aristogiton, although tortured for a few days, revealed nothing of any broader plot. Yet could Hippias afford to believe that the two assassins had acted on their own? Hipparchus, after all, had been murdered because he had abused his power; and the whisper on the streets was that he had been the victim, not of a crime of passion, but of a heroic blow struck in the cause of freedom. Hippias began to grow paranoid. With the ebbing of his confidence, the shadow play which he and his family had long orchestrated appeared increasingly a sham. The balance that they had always struck with such delicacy—between the true nature of their regime and the sets which had served to adorn it, between menace and a gracious magnanimity—was fatally upset. Despairing, the bereaved and panicky Hippias began to rely increasingly upon naked terror. Executions, previously carried out in back rooms, were soon washing the city in blood. Repression bred conspiracy; conspiracy led to further repression. The pretense that Athens was anything other than a police state began to seem a savage joke. Hippias, formerly “a man who was always easily approachable,”³⁸ now hunkered himself away among his Scythians and his other foreign mercenaries, as though he were some alien despot, as though barely Athenian at all.

Yet who was there to dispose of him? Heated talk of revolution in the salons of the aristocracy or in the bars of the Ceramicus was all very well—but someone had to take a lead. All eyes turned to Cleisthenes, who duly materialized, jackal-like as ever, on the northern frontier of Attica, barely a year after Hipparchus’ death. Presented with the opportunity to throw out Hippias, however, the Athenians signally failed to take it. Resentful of the tyranny though they had become, they were hardly more enthusiastic about restoring the Alcmaeonids to power. Cleisthenes, once his invasion force had been annihilated by Hippias’ mercenaries, had no choice but to slink back across the border. Behind him, on the battlefield, he left the corpses of those few Athenians who had dared to support him. “Good warriors, and nobly born—they showed the blood that flowed in their veins.”³⁹

For the Athenians, it appeared, a grim truth had been revealed: the only alternative to slavery was banishment or death.

Power to the People

Not that the irrepressible Cleisthenes himself had given up. Wallowing in self-doubt was hardly the Alcmaeonid way. Even as he licked his wounds, the man who remained the tyranny’s most dangerous adversary was scouting around for fresh allies. Cleisthenes knew that he was far from the only man who wished to see Hippias fall. A second quality schemer, positively Alcmaeonid in his eye for the main chance, and far exceeding the Alcmaeonids in the resources available to him, also had an interest in destabilizing Athens. Indeed, King Cleomenes of Sparta, back in 519 BC, during his first expedition north of the Isthmus, had already had a stab at it. On that occasion the Plataeans, citizens of a small city ten miles south of Thebes, had approached him for support against their overweening neighbor; and Cleomenes, with malevolent cunning, had advised them to turn for help instead to Athens. Unable to resist this flattering appeal, the brother tyrants had duly marched to the Plataeans’ defense and won an overwhelming victory: a result which, although gaining for the Athenians the undying loyalty of little Plataea, had, of course, dealt a death blow to their friendship with the powerful Thebans. Since this had been a mainstay of Pisistratid foreign policy since at least the time of their father’s second exile, the whole episode could be reckoned a major blunder. Cleomenes had been left rubbing his hands in glee.

But could Cleisthenes, putting out feelers six years later, persuade the Spartan king to intervene openly against Hippias? It might have appeared a quixotic hope. The Pisistratids, despite their marriage alliance to Argos, had been careful to hedge their bets and stay on the good side of Sparta, too—so much so that Hippias was officially ranked as “a friend of the Spartan people.” Before approaching their king, however, Cleisthenes would surely have done some homework on his man. He would have known that Cleomenes, with his proven enthusiasm for meddling in the business of cities beyond the Peloponnese, was hardly the model of a hidebound Spartan king. A politician with Cleisthenes’ silver tongue would have been confident of convincing Cleomenes of what the latter was no doubt inclined to believe anyway: that Hippias, with his megalomaniacal building projects and his alliance with Argos, was a menace to Spartan interests. Yet Cleomenes, no matter how unorthodox in his approach to international relations, could hardly be expected to launch an unprovoked attack against a man who was, after all, “a friend of the Spartan people”—not without some trumped-up justification, at the very least. Here too, however, the ever-resourceful Cleisthenes was able to oblige. Not for nothing had the Alcmaeonids made themselves the favorites of Delphi—even to the extent of paying for lavish refurbishments after the great fire of 548 BC. Now, after decades of devoted patronage, it was payback time. Spartans who consulted the oracle received a single, invariable reply. No matter what questions they put to Apollo, the same answer always came back—“it was their duty to set Athens free.”⁴⁰ When this startling news was reported back to Sparta, it was greeted with consternation. Perhaps only Cleomenes, tipped off by Cleisthenes as he must have been, failed to share in the general perplexity and alarm.

Not that there could be any question, for a people as devout as the Spartans, of ignoring Apollo’s command, no matter how bemused by it they might be. “After all, while it was perfectly true that the Pisistratids were good friends of theirs, what were human ties when set against the orders of a god?”⁴¹ The first expedition sent against Athens—perhaps reflecting the Spartans’ continued unease at the illegality of what they were doing—was low key and undermanned, and Hippias was able to repel it easily. The second, with their prestige now directly at stake, was overwhelming. In the summer of 510 BC, a Spartan army led by Cleomenes himself advanced from the Isthmus and crossed into Attica. This time, almost disdainfully, it swatted aside Hippias’ mercenaries. Scuttling back into Athens, the tyrant holed himself up with his family on the Acropolis, where Cleomenes promptly barricaded him, blocking off every place of refuge with such an attention to detail that when Hippias sought to smuggle out his children to safety, they dropped straight into the Spartans’ hands. Their father, bargaining desperately for their lives, was issued a stern ultimatum: he must leave Attica at once. Stunned by the abruptness of his fall, Hippias found himself with little choice but to accept these bitter terms. His only consolation as he left the city he had ruled for so long would have been to reflect that exile, for any tyrant, could be considered something of an occupational hazard—and that, as his father had amply demonstrated, there was nothing to stop him from plotting his return. In the short term, however, the tyranny was finished. Athens, dramatically, unexpectedly, was free.

But what did her freedom mean? On that score, the two men whose maneuverings had done most to restore it to her held ominously contrasting views. Cleisthenes, no matter what he might have promised Cleomenes while in exile, had not the slightest intention of seeing his city become a client state of Sparta. Cleomenes himself, meanwhile, having risked Spartan lives in the cause of a thoroughly illegal war, was looking for precisely such a return on his investment. Even if he could not have a regime that was actively subservient, he wanted, at the very least, an Athens so racked by factionalism that she would cease to function as a threat to Sparta. Soon enough, the compact between the two conspirators began to break down. In the shadowboxing that followed, the advantage appeared to be all Cleomenes’. Certainly, Eupatrid suspicions of Cleisthenes remained as dark as ever, and there were any number of aristocrats, now that the dead hand of the tyranny had been removed, keen to get back to the good old days of ganging up against the Alcmaeonids. Opposition to Cleisthenes began to gravitate around a rival nobleman by the name of Isagoras, “a former friend of the tyrants”⁴²—and to such effect that he was elected in 508 BC to the archonship. Cleomenes, by now openly aligned against his former partner, let it be known from Sparta that he thoroughly approved. So vital had Isagoras regarded the backing of the Spartan king, and so desperately had he craved it, that it was rumored he had gone so far as to pimp Cleomenes his wife.

Cleisthenes, though he had stooped to many low tricks in his time, had never sunk quite as low as that. For all his mastery of scam and spin, he was much more than the grasping opportunist of his enemies’ propaganda. Resolute in his determination not to see Athens sunk to the status of a Spartan client state, he could also recognize that Isagoras and his allies were fighting a war that had already had its day. Few Athenians might have recognized it, but the character of their city had changed forever. Authority, under the tyrants, had become a thing of shadow, melted from the grip of the elite who had once hugged it so tightly to themselves. Now that the tyranny itself was gone, it was difficult to say where precisely power resided. With those few families, the Alcmaeonids themselves, perhaps, or the Philaids, who still had a personal base? Perhaps, but Cleisthenes’ own experiences since his return to Athens had demonstrated that even the very grandest Eupatrids, weakened by exile or by the humiliations of collaboration, had been perilously leeched of their prestige. Menaced by Isagoras, he chose to turn for support not, as was traditional for one of his background, to other factions among the elite, to those of wealth and breeding, but to a wholly original source. Addressing an assembly of the citizens, Cleisthenes proposed what was in effect a revolution.⁴³ If the people, as Hippias, as Pisistratus, as even Solon had always claimed, were truly sovereign, very well then—let them have authority over the city to match. Let them debate policy, and vote on it, and implement it, without regard to qualifications of class or wealth. Let power—kratos—be invested in the demos. Let Athens, in short, become a demokratia.⁴⁴

A program so startling, so baldly radical, that it was wholly without precedent. His opponents, caught off balance, responded with howls of rage and disbelief. While Cleisthenes’ proposals, unsurprisingly, “won him the wholehearted backing of the people,”⁴⁵ they appeared to Isagoras and his followers a scam of quite terrifying irresponsibility, reckless and cynical even by the standards of past Alcmaeonid maneuvering. Yet, if anything, the truth was even more unsettling for the aristocracy. The measures Cleisthenes was putting forward, in the sweep of their ambition, and in the brilliance of their design, did not have the character of a cornered gambler’s makeshift throw. Far from it: they showed every sign of having been most carefully worked out. Cleisthenes would have had no lack of opportunity, in the bitterness of his exile, to reflect upon how all the ambitions of the nobility, all the pretensions of his own and of the other Eupatrid clans had led only to decades of internal feuding and to the indignities of a tyranny. Athens was sick—so much everyone agreed. What possible hope, then, for a cure? Only one, Cleisthenes and his associates appear to have decided. To break the mold; to harness the ambitions not only of the elite but of all the Athenian people; to create, from their energy, a future for Athens that would at last match the full measure of her potential. A great, a momentous, a breathtaking gamble—and on it Cleisthenes appeared willing to stake everything.

Except that, suddenly, his nerve failed him. In the early summer of 507 BC, a herald arrived from Sparta, and demanded, citing the ancient curse, the expulsion of the Alcmaeonids. Clearly, in the game of cat and mouse between the two former allies, Cleomenes still had plenty of moves to make. Cleisthenes, as though dreading what might come next, promptly turned tail and fled. Soon afterward, Cleomenes himself, accompanied by a small bodyguard of soldiers, came breezing into town. Briskly, he ordered a further purging of anti-Spartan elements, seven hundred families in all. Then, swaggering up to the Acropolis, he settled down with Isagoras to dictate a new constitutional order. Naturally, there was to be no place in it for any nonsense about democracy. Just as naturally, Isagoras, who had already loaned his wife to Cleomenes, was now obliged to pimp Athens herself to Sparta.

As the two men, king and traitor, deliberated, however, there came from the streets far below them an ominous and violent sound: that of rioting. Peering down from the battlements, Cleomenes saw angry crowds massing before the gates of the Acropolis, blockading him and his soldiers on the summit. To put it mildly, this was unexpected. Who could possibly be directing the riot? Cleisthenes was in exile. His associates had also been expelled. Slowly, as the hours passed, the unpalatable truth dawned. The Athenian people themselves, infuriated by Cleomenes’ presumptions and Isagoras’ treachery, had risen spontaneously in defense of their promised freedoms—nor did they appear in any mood to be placated. For two days the blockade was maintained. By the third, Cleomenes, “hungry, filthy, and stubble-chinned,”⁴⁶ had had enough. A truce was arranged; the Spartans, humiliatingly, were obliged to accept safe conduct to the border; Isagoras, somehow escaping the city too, managed to slip away into exile. His fellow collaborators, meanwhile, were rounded up and put to death. Democracy, having staked its future amid the smoke and bloodshed of revolution, had endured the first attempt to snuff it out.

Brought the news, Cleisthenes promptly hurried back in triumph. The victory, however, as everyone knew, was hardly his alone. Even his most diehard opponents now had to accept that there could be no retreating from the reform program he had promised the Athenian people: for it was, after they had stormed the Acropolis and defeated Cleomenes, their simple due. Indeed, with the lynching of Isagoras’ followers still fresh in everybody’s mind, it had become possible even for the upper classes to feel a certain sense of relief that Cleisthenes was back on the scene. Better him and his carefully planned package of reforms than blood flowing in the streets, and Eupatrid corpses strung up on the Acropolis, rotting in the heat.

So it was that midway through that momentous year of 507 BC, an Alcmaeonid relative of Cleisthenes was able to take over smoothly from Isagoras as archon and resume the transformation of Athens into a state like no other in history. While “eunomia”—good governance—had been the watchword of previous Greek reformers, from Lycurgus to Solon, that of Cleisthenes and his associates was subtly, and yet radically, different: “isonomia”—equality. Equality before the law, equality of participation in the running of the state: this, henceforward, was to be the Athenian ideal. True, some citizens remained much more equal than others: it remained the case, for instance, that only the upper classes could run for high office. Nevertheless, although certain relics of the old order had been preserved from the democratic tide, many more were soon to lie submerged beneath it for ever: Solon, for one, would barely have recognized the flood scene. Athens had become a city in which any citizen, no matter how poor or uneducated, was guaranteed freedom of public speech;⁴⁷ in which policy was no longer debated in the closed and gilded salons of the aristocracy, but openly, in the Assembly, before “carpenter, blacksmith or cobbler, merchant or ship-owner, rich or poor, aristocrat or low-born alike”;⁴⁸ in which no measure could be adopted, no law passed, save by the votes of all the Athenian people. It was a great and noble experiment, a state in which, for the first time, a citizen could feel himself both engaged and in control. Nothing in Athens, or indeed Greece, would ever quite be the same again.

And that, for Cleisthenes and all who supported him, was absolutely the point. The sponsors of the Athenian revolution were no giddy visionaries moved by shimmering notions of brotherhood with the poor, but rather hard-nosed pragmatists whose goal, quite simply, was to profit as Athenian noblemen by making their city strong. To this ambition, and to the whole immense project that followed from it, they brought a desperate energy. Time, as they well knew, was hardly on their side. It was not only that Cleomenes, “who felt that the Athenians had shown him disrespect in word and deed,”⁴⁹ was set on revenge; Cleisthenes also feared, with both Hippias and Isagoras plotting their returns, that the city might implode at any moment into rival factions. Dynastic feuding, having brought Athens to the point of ruin, was simply too lethal to be tolerated any further—an analysis which even the dynasties themselves appeared reluctantly now to have accepted.

Yet how to neutralize them? Cleisthenes’ solution was both brilliantly simple and quite ferociously ambitious: to suppress a citizen’s identification with family, neighborhood and local clan chief altogether. Since these were instincts that had long come naturally to almost everyone in Attica, the plan to scotch them required peculiarly ingenious and detailed measures. Punctiliously, Cleisthenes sliced up the countryside, with its ancient tapestry of towns, estates and villages, into almost 150 separate districts. It was from these, the “demes,” and no longer from their families, that the citizens of the new democracy would henceforward be obliged to take their second names. Their civic identity too—for a young man, when he came of age, might become a citizen of Athens under Cleisthenes’ reforms only by being enrolled within a deme. This was to apply to the haughtiest Eupatrid and the humblest plowman in the field alike: both, as fellow demesmen, would share the same second name. Not all Eupatrids were necessarily thrilled by this innovation, of course. Some of them, particularly those so grand that they had an estate or village, and thereby a deme, named after them, made their disgruntlement with the new order all too clear. The Boutads, for instance, fed up with having to share their distinguished nomenclature with riffraff, pointedly gave themselves a new name: the Authentic Boutads.⁵⁰

Still, they had to be careful. Sniff too pointedly at one’s fellow demesmen, and even an Authentic Boutad might find himself excluded from public life. Cleisthenes, with his customary preemptive cunning, had ordained that demesmen should select delegates from among themselves to travel to Athens, and there prepare the agenda for the Assembly. What aristocrat worth his salt was going to put snobbery above such a plum opportunity? Just as Cleisthenes had to encourage the Eupatrids not to sulk in their tents, so he had to beware a counter-danger: that an ambitious nobleman might use his deme as a springboard to tyranny. Against that peril, deploying both their habitual foresight and their fiendish taste for complicating anything they touched, the founders of the democracy massed a whole array of checks and balances. Attica, already partitioned into demes, was scored with further patterning and fretwork. Demes were bunched into “thirds,” a “third,” as the name implied, was then grouped with two others to form a tribe. Since the thirds would all be drawn from separate corners of Attica—one from a mountainside, perhaps another from the coast, and another from nearby Athens herself—every tribe, of which there were ten in all, inevitably served to snarl up ancient roots. In place of the primal simplicities of the clan, the Athenian people could now enjoy infinitely more artificial and finely calibrated loyalties. Tribes, thirds and demes: here were complexities not easily manipulable by even the best-connected aristocrats.

But could they be made to work? Since no one had ever attempted to found a democracy before, no one actually knew. Watching the progress of the revolution in mounting alarm, Athens’ neighbors could hardly afford to take its failure for granted—and Cleomenes, in particular, had good reason to fear the worst. If Cleisthenes and his associates, laboring furiously to entrench their reforms, always kept one nervous eye on the Spartans, then so too did the Spartan king, as he plotted counterrevolution, dread that he might be in a race against time himself. Fabulously intricate though the democratic reforms were, their potential appeared to Cleomenes ominously clear. No longer divided among themselves, the citizens of a democratic Athens would at last be able to present a united front to their neighbors. The sheer size of Attica would give them a truly fearsome capability. For centuries a military pygmy, Athens appeared on the verge of becoming, almost overnight, a heavyweight.

And most wounding of all for Cleomenes was the fact that he, by deposing the Pisistratids, had effectively served as the midwife of the Athenians’ rogue regime. He was well aware that many of his countrymen, resentful of his proactive foreign policy, were starting to whisper against him, muttering about overstretch and complaining that all his meddlings in Athens had led only to disaster. For the moment, no one was strong enough to challenge him openly. The ephors were still reluctant to tread on his toes, and his fellow king, Demaratus, son of the once-plain girl who had been granted beauty by the apparition of Helen, remained firmly in his shadow. Yet the longer the Athenians thumbed their noses, the greater was the damage to his prestige, and the more closely he would need to guard his back. Preparing for his final bout against Cleisthenes, Cleomenes could not afford to take any chances. No wandering into Attica with a few bodyguards this time. When, in the summer of 506 BC, he and Demaratus finally advanced across the Isthmus, Isagoras in their train, the two kings led a strike force formed not only of their own steel-limbed countrymen but of contingents summoned from across the Peloponnese. They had other allies, too. The Thebans, still smarting from the Athenians’ alliance with Plataea, readily joined the party by invading from the west. Meanwhile, crossing the straits that separated Attica from the long, narrow island of Euboea to the north, an army from the city of Chalcis formed the third prong of what now stood revealed as a brilliantly coordinated assault. Cleomenes had done his work well. Athens was effectively surrounded. The infant democracy seemed certain to be strangled in its cradle.

Yet as the Athenians, opting to confront their deadliest opponents first, prepared to march southward to meet the two Spartan kings, they might have found a plausible omen of hope in the route ahead of them. The road was no ordinary one. Every September a great procession of the Athenian people would take it, garlanded with myrtle, dressed in white, raising, as they walked, the “iacche,” an ululation of joy and triumph. Not for nothing was the road known as the “Sacred Way”—for it led, seventeen miles from Athens, to the holy shrine of Eleusis, where a great mystery would be taught: that from death life might arise and from the darkest despair the light of hope. No more propitious place for a defense of the city’s liberty could possibly have been imagined—and sure enough, when the Athenians arrived at Eleusis, they discovered that a miracle had indeed occurred. The Spartans, and all the vast host that had marched with them, had gone. Demaratus, it was said, jealous of his fellow king and mistrustful of his foreign adventures, had been fomenting dissent. Many of the Peloponnesian allies, led by Corinth, had duly deserted; Cleomenes, finding himself suddenly without an army, had been forced, in impotent fury, to abort the invasion. The Athenians, stunned by the sheer scale of their deliverance, could presume only that the gods had come to their rescue—although some of them, remembering Cleisthenes’ previous facility with backhanders, may have wondered whether they actually owed as much to Alcmaeonid gold.

Not that the Thebans, in their hatred of Athens, could be bribed. Swinging swiftly northward to meet them, the new model army of the democracy now faced its first authentic test. Cleisthenes, and everyone who had labored so hard with him on his reforms, braced themselves for the result. One question, in particular, was about to be answered. Accustomed as the average Athenian was to fighting in the train of a great aristocrat, would he now feel sufficient loyalty to a novel and wholly artificial innovation, his tribe, to stand in the line of battle, to cover the flank of his fellow demesman, to fight not for a clan lord but for an ideal, for liberty, for Athens herself? The answer, resoundingly, triumphantly, was yes. The Theban invasion force was annihilated. On the same day, crossing into Euboea, the Athenians forced Chalcis to sue for a humiliating peace, and accept, on what had previously been her own territory, a huge colony of four thousand Athenian settlers.

And so it was that the Athenians found themselves suddenly a great power. Not just in one field, but in everything they set their minds to, they gave vivid proof of what equality and freedom of speech might achieve. As the subjects of a tyrant, what had they accomplished? Nothing exceptional, to be sure. With the tyrant gone, however, they had suddenly become the best fighters in the world. Held down like slaves, they had shirked and slacked; once they had won their freedom, not a citizen but he could feel that he was labouring for himself.⁵¹

It appeared that democracy might indeed be made to work.

A boast that the Athenians now joyously proclaimed to all the world. Returning to their city, they commissioned, in the ecstasy of their deliverance, an immense victory memorial—a chariot led by four horses fashioned completely out of bronze—and placed it directly beyond the gates to the Acropolis. There, raised on what had previously been the supreme showcase for aristocratic megalomania, the intimidating sculpture gleamed, the first thing that anyone entering the citadel would see, a monument raised not to any individual but to “the sons of the Athenians”⁵²—to the people as a whole. Elsewhere, too, all across Athens, the renewed din of chiseling bore ample witness to the democracy’s enthusiasm for a facelift. Masons who had previously been laboring on the Pisistratids’ gargantuan temple could now be found at work on the sloping hill west of the Acropolis, the Pnyx, hewing from its rock an immense new meeting place for the Assembly, capable of seating up to five thousand at a time: a first and fitting monument to government by the people. Meanwhile, stretching away northward beyond the Pnyx and the Acropolis, in the great square raised to himself by Pisistratus, other workmen were systematically excising all traces of the tyranny. The half-completed temple of Zeus was left to stand as a monument to the tyrants’ folly, but the massive public space that Pisistratus had cleared in the heart of the city could not so easily be abandoned—not least because the citizens of the new democracy needed such a meeting place. “Agora,” they began to call it—the word for an area that all Greek cities had, a space where people might freely gather. The previous Athenian agora, to the northeast of the Acropolis, found its venerable public buildings supplanted, while the new one, of a scale and beauty altogether more worthy of the dignity of the people, was duly enshrined as the symbolic heart of the democracy.⁵³

A point rammed home by the installation, right in its center, of a hefty bronze of the two tyrannicides. Their swords drawn, their faces stern, their bodies heroically if improbably nude, Harmodius and Aristogiton were portrayed as the joint saviors of Athens and the founders of her freedom. Considering that there were no other public portraits to be seen in the whole of Athens, the dominant position of these statues in the Agora was startling enough. What made it even more jaw-dropping, of course, was the fact that Harmodius and Aristogiton, far from having sacrificed themselves for liberty, had in reality cut down Hipparchus in a squalid lovers’ tiff. Indeed, if anyone deserved to be hailed as the city’s liberator, it was probably the King of Sparta—but the Athenians did not care to dwell on that. Hence the value to them of the tyrannicides. Like every other revolutionary state in history, Cleisthenes’ regime had an urgent need of heroes. Harmodius and Aristogiton, gratifyingly sanguinary, even more gratifyingly dead, were duly spun as democracy’s first martyrs.

The hype also served a more profound purpose. Cleisthenes understood his countrymen well; he knew that the Athenian people, revolutionaries though they had rather startlingly proved themselves to be, remained, in their souls, traditionalists still. Far from glorying in the novel character of the democracy, they craved reassurance that it was rooted in their past. Cleisthenes, ever subtle, had therefore been sure to adorn even his most daring experiments in the fustian of tradition. The tribes, for instance, had all been given the names of antique heroes, as though, like the Athenians themselves, they had sprung not from Cleisthenes’ fertile brain but directly from the soil. Even the democracy itself, so its founders implied, far from being something new, was in fact the primordial birthright of all the people of Attica, having originally been bequeathed to them back in the days of legend by the celebrated hero Theseus, slayer of the minotaur. Seen in such a light, what were the two tyrannicides themselves but monster killers, selfless patriots who had died in order that Athenian democracy might be restored? Smoke and mirrors all, of course—and hardly paying to Cleisthenes and his associates anything remotely like their due. Yet it is perhaps the clinching proof of their greatness that even Cleisthenes himself, scion of a family rarely noted for its modesty, should have recognized how essential it was to veil the full scale of his achievement behind such fantastical shadows. In founding democracy, he had invented his city’s future; but he had also, just as crucially, fabricated its past.

No statue of Cleisthenes in the Agora, then. Nor any place for him in his countrymen’s affections as their democracy’s founding father. Indeed, no sooner was he dead than the Athenians, indulging themselves in an extraordinary bout of amnesia, started to forget that they had passed through a revolution at all.*¹² So natural did their new form of government already appear to them, so deeply rooted in the Attic soil, that a true understanding of its origins, just as Cleisthenes had calculated it would, began to fade. It was a bittersweet paradox: in the false-memory syndrome that buried Cleisthenes in obscurity was the ultimate proof of his stunning success. Not merely to have redeemed his country from civil war, but to have set it upon enduring foundations—only Darius, of Cleisthenes’ contemporaries, could compare. To be sure, between the Persian, monarch of all the world, and the Athenian, friend of the people, there might have appeared few correspondences; and yet in truth, in the scale of their achievements, and in what they betokened for the future, the two men were indeed well matched. Both had come to power amid bloodshed and given their countries peace; both had tamed the ambitions of a turbulent aristocracy; both, in doing so, had crafted a radical new future for their people and yet opted to disguise their originality behind the lumber of the past. Both, most portentously of all, had created something restless, and dangerous, and new.

Nor, for all that Athens, set upon the remote margins of the world as she was, stood shrouded in a natural obscurity, was Darius quite as oblivious to her now as he had previously been. Reports of her revolution had arrived in Persepolis. In 507 BC, while the Athenians were nervously awaiting the Spartan onslaught, and noting, with alarm, that Hippias had taken refuge on the southern side of the Hellespont, in territory held by Persia, they had sent an embassy to Sardis. There sat Artaphernes, brother of the King of Kings, ruthless and shrewd. When the Athenian ambassadors had arrived at his court and begged him for an alliance against the Spartans, Artaphernes had graciously granted their request. Naturally, however, he had set a condition of his own: the usual gift of earth and water. The Athenian ambassadors, shrugging their shoulders, had accepted his terms. On their return to Athens, when they reported the news of the submission they had made to Artaphernes, “they were severely censured”⁵⁴—which no doubt enabled the democracy to feel good about itself. The Athenians, however, did not repudiate the alliance with Persia—or their own submission. Better safe than sorry. Even after the great victories of 506 BC, who knew when Cleomenes might be back? An insurance policy against the Spartans was no bad thing—even if it had cost a symbolic humiliation. And what was a gift of earth and water? A gesture—nothing more.

Or so, at any rate, it pleased the Athenians to assume.