I. ANCIENT CONSTRUCTIONS OF DEMOCRACY'S REVOLUTION
P11
But I want here to draw attention to a closely parallel elision: the equation of isegoria and freedom from tyranny.
the date from which the length of freedom enjoyed to that point by the Athenians is counted is the end of the tyranny- not, to be sure, the killing of Hipparchus but the expulsion of Hippias - rather than the constitutional reforms of Cleisthenes.
P12
How are we to explain Thucydides' and Herodotus' implied identification of the fall of the tyranny with the arrival of democracy?
What such an identification facilitated was the idea that tyranny was the only alternative to democracy, that democracy alone could guarantee freedom.
The combination of identification of a specifically democratic feature, the equal right of all to have their voice heard in public, with removal of tyrants elides Cleisthenes and allows for a polarised politics in which anything that is not tyranny can be regarded as democracy.
If what was at stake in the late fifth-century elision of Cleisthenes was the characterisation of contemporary political choice, almost the fetishisation of the existing constitution, the well-known fourth-century lack of interest in Cletsthenes stems rathe from a change in emphasis as to what was the central democratic institution.
P13
At the end of book 2 of Politics (1273b36-1274a21), Aristotle examines Solon's grounds for being regarded as the crucial figure:
besides his ending of the slavery of the people, his claim to having replaced extreme oligarchy with 'ancestral democracy' is seen as a claim to have been a moderate figure.
It cannot be stressed too strongly how different the terms of this debate are to the terms in ·which Herodotus and Thucydides write about Athenian democracy, and even from the terms in which Aristophanes writes.
But for Aristotle it is the history of the courts which has become the history of democracy- a history in which Cleisthenes has no part.
It is hard not to see Aristotle's view asreflecting the debate at the end of the fifth century about the role of the courts in the interpretation of law and how this was influenced by the way in which laws were framed.
This political view of the courts was given some firm constitutional basis after 403 by three separate but related developments.
One was the referral of more and more assembly decisions to the courts for a final verdict,
the second the development of the graphe paranomon,
P14 making it possible for decisions of the assembly to be challenged in court, and
the third the hiving off of law to be made, as well as enforced, by the panel of kikasts and not by the assembly.
The popularity in the fourth century of the view that Solon was a crucial democratic figure,a view of which Anscotle is only the most articulate exponent, arguablyresults from the need to find ancestral Justification for developments introduced so surreptitiously that the constitutional history in the Constitution of the Athenians fails even to note them.
II. DEMOCRACY'S REVOLUTION IN ANGLOPHONE SCHOLARSHIP
It was George Grote who reinstated Cleisthenes the revolutionary.
For Grote the fundamental achievement of Cleisthenes was to deprive the exitsting ruling class of their stranglehold on power, and the terms in which he describes this turn on the notion of privilege.
P15
Grote notes that Cleisthenes builds upon, but modifies, Solon's political institutions, discusses not only Cleisthenes' constitutional innovations but also his reforms of the army and of finances, and ascribes to him the sovereignty of the popular courts.
There is no attempt to deny either Solon's achievements or his place in the history of Athenian democracy.
P16
But Grote does also emphasise that Solon's constitution was not itself Athenian democracy.
Arguably Solon is not regarded by Grote as founding democracy not because Solon looked too much like a French revolutionary reformer, but because his Timocracy was too much like Britain before the Great Reform Act of 1832.
What scholars after Grote found in the Constitution of the Athenians however, was reason to oppose Grote's Cleisthenic revolution.
This is most clearly explicit in the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History.
P17
But the treatment of Cleisthenes later in the same volume by E. M. Walker (1926), whose whole approach is heavily influenced by the Constitution of the Athenians, distances itself from Grote.
One major consequence of Walker's diffusion of various constitutional reforms is that he begins to turn Ephialtes into a major figure.
Not a single Athenian orator, not even Isocrates in his Areopagiticus, mentions the Ephialtic reform of the Areopagus.
It is the non-Athenian Aristotle who briefly, in Politics 1274a7-u, outlines the sort of story that Walker tells, and it is from the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians, Plutarch of Chaeronea and Diodorus of Sicily that the picture has to be filled out.
P18 (Evelyn Abott's A History of Greece) Here Abbott is happy to follow Grote on the importance of Cleisthenes but he does so to stress not the virtues o classical emocracy but its vice.
P19
The dishonesty ascribed to the nineteenth-century urban poor surely looms in the background here.
Walker's model of the history of Athenian democracy dominated English scholarship throughout the middle of the twentieth century.
It is essentially the model adopted by Charles Hignett.
Hignett remains expansive over Ephialtes.
His Solon is a minimalist figure, and something of a Cromwell:
I shall try to prove that their functions and powers, though carefully defined and limited by Solon in his code, remained substantially the same as before. (A History of the Athenian Constitution. p. 89)
P20
His Cleisthenes is not much less minimalist.
'In these respects then his constitution was identical with that created by Solon. And though in others it was more truly a δεμοκρατία than Solon's, it was more democratic in form than in practice' (p. 157). 'Kleisthenes had based his constitution on the firmest possible foundation, the support of a strong and vigorous middle class' (p. 157).
'The revolution of 462 was the decisive stage in the development of the constitution from a moderate to a radical democracy' (p. 213).
Ephialtes has been up- ( or down-) graded from reformer to revolutionary, and this time the French Revolution is explicitly the parallel.
If Hignett made Ephialtes a key figure in his tragic narrative, George Forrest made him equally crucial in what is essentially a romance, The Emergence of Greek Democracy of 1966.
P21
Forrest sees the basic principle of democracy as laid down by Solon.
Cleisthenes, on the other hand was simply a political manipulator, not fully aware of the implications of his actions.
By contrast 'the constitutional changes of 462 would establish the final form of Athenian democracy' (p. 207), and 'No one would deny that 462 was a turning point in Athenian history' (pp. 216-17).
注释12： Forrest's view of Cleisthenes as a manipulator almost certainly owes something to the highly influential views of David Lewis (see Lewis (1963) ). It is notable that Woodhead (1967 ), a man of conservative political views, in resisting Lewis' views does so in the context of insisting that what Cleisthenes really wanted to create was a world in which the Counctl conunued to be the dominant political body.
The model which makes 462 a key date has continued to have some currency.
In the new edition of the Cambridge Ancient History, ...
Rhodes... he declares roundly that 'The final achievement of democracy was the deliberate work of Ephialtes and his associates' (p. 87).
By contrast the Solonian constitution 'was not
P22 democracy, and it was not intended to be democracy' (p. 88), and
whether Cleisthenes intended his constitution to be more democratic than Solon's is an unresolved question (p. 89).
J. K. Davies , like Rhodes a pupil of Forrest, also uses 'The Athenian RevoIution' as a chapter title in hisDemocracy and Classical Greece, and again it is to the events of 462 and thetr consequences that he refers.
P23
In both Davies and Rhodes the focus has moved from who participated (Forrest's Ephialtic opening up of government to 'ordinary men') to how government was regulated.
In the late eighties and nineties, the scholarly going has mainly been made outside Britain, the Ephialtic revolution has been increasingly played down, and Cleisthenes and Solon have reasserted themselves.
Two figures merit particular attention here, Josiah Ober and Robert Wallace.
P24 Ober is sceptical about whether Cleisrhenes introduced freedom of debate (his gloss on isegoria) (72-3) and stresses rather the importance of collective responsibility for decisions.
Strikingly, Ephialtes' reforms are incorporated into a section on 'Constitutional reforms to ca. 440'.
Subsequently Ober will insist that the reforms embodied in the restoration of democracy in 403 'are not a watershed in the terms of political sociology' (p. 96).
The crucial place of the events associated with Cleisthenes in Ober's model emerges from the paper 'The Athenian Revolution of 508/7 B.C.E.: Violence, Authority, and the Origins of Democracy' of 1993, and from his decision to give the title The Athenian Revolution to the collection of this and other of his essays on Athens published in 1996.
But his concern is not so much to rescue Cleisthenes as a revolutionary as to insist that Cleisthenes was but the means for making something of the revolutionary ferment of the people.
He concludes:
Kleisthenes saw that the revolutionary action of the Athenian demos had permanently changed the environment of politics and political discourse. After the revolution there could be no secure recourse to extrademotic authority. If Athens were to survive as a polis, there would have to be a new basis for politically authoritative speech, but that basis must find its ground in the will of the demos itself··· Kleisthenes came up with a constitutional order that both framed and built upon the revolution that had started without him.
P25 Against this view, Robert Wallace, ... has recently revived the claims of Solon to be the founder of democracy.
For him, once more, Cleisthenes did very little - just a bit of tribal reform.
In Wallace's view this was not a matter of Solon devising a constitution that no one wanted:
'Solon's democratic constitution reflected and was the product of ordinary people's self-confident demand for a right to political power' (p. 12);
What this brief summary makes clear is the similarities between Ober's claims for Cleisthenes and Wallace's for Solon.
Both believe that the 'revolutionary ferment' came from the people, they simply disagree as to whether it was the people at the time of Solon or the people at the time of Cleisthenes who succeeded in getting themselves the essential basics of democracy.
Wallace opts for Solon be.cause he puts the weight on setting up the tnst1tut1ons; Ober opts for Cleisthenes because he puts the weight on the need for evidence of changed 'patterns of thought, speech and action'.
P26 But if debates about the adequacy of evidence are bound to prove inconclusive, debates about the nature of democracy are more educative.
One of the most remarkable features of the history of situating the democratic revolution at Athens is that modern scholars have resisted the elision of Cleisthenes' reforms and the equation of democracy and freedom.
The modern scholarly identification of particular moments as decisive in the history of democracy has been no less political than that ancient equation, but has little to do with ancient politics.
P27 There is a politics to the presentation of democratic revolution even by those who might regard themselves as least 'political'.
Arguing about which out of Solon, Cleisthenes or Ephialtes one should consider the democratic revolutionary, relegating the other two to mere 'reformers', may seem fatuous.
Even among the most careful of scholars the privileging of particular sources, as well as the privileging of particular criteria, predetermines the answer.
When I myself declare, in a section headed 'The political revolution' that 'The creation of the deme was a political revolution', that answer is a product of privileging practical access to power, not merely of puzzling over how Cleisthenes attracted widespread support.
P28 The inability of modern scholars to settle the issue is not a reflection of their inadequacy or unreasonable bias, but of the continued live engagement with the issues of how properly to effect popular government.
For all the desire of scholarly literature to settle on a revolution, the revolution was always already rethought.
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