Carol Dougherty and Leslie Kurke (eds.),Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Chapter Eleven: The Athenian Revolution of 508/7 B.C.E.: Violence, Authority, and the Origins of Democracy
Josiah Ober
P215
The problem of fixing the end of the archaic period and the transition to the classical is thus a historiographic problem, one that reflects contemporary scholarly inclinations more than it does ancient realities. (p215)
for those interested in Athenian political history, the end of the archaic and the beginning of something new may reasonably be said to have come about in the period from ca. 510 to 506 B.C.E., with the revolutionary events that established the form of government that would soon come to be called demokratia.
Historians typically discuss the revolution in the antiseptic terminology of "constitutional development" and their narrative accounts tend to be narrowly centered around the person and intentions of Kleisthenes himself.
Putting Kleisthenes at the center of the revolution as a whole entails slighting significant parts of the source tradition.
And that tradition, which consists almost entirely of brief discussions in Herodotus (5.66, 69-78) and the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (20-1), is scanty enough as it is.
I hope to show that by sticking very closely to the primary sources, it is possible to derive a plausible and internally coherent narrative that revolves around the Athenian people rather than their leaders.
A close reading of the sources shows that the dominant role
P216 ascribed to elite leaders in modern accounts of a key point in the revolution is supplementary to the ancient evidence.
The ascription of authoritative leadership in all phases of the revolution to Kleisthenes may, I think, be attributed to the uncritical (and indeed unconscious) acceptance of a view of history that supposes that all advances in human affairs come through the consciously willed actions of individual members of an elite.
like that of later Athenian politicians, Kleisthenes' leadership was not dependent on constitutional authority, but rather on his ability to persuade the Athenian people to adopt and to act on the proposals he advocated.
In sum, I will attempt to show that while Kleisthenes was indeed a very important player in Athens' revolutionary dramas, the key role was played by the demos. And thus,demokratiawas not a gift from a benevolent elite to a passive demos, but was the product of collective decision, action, and self-definition on the part of the demos itself.
the moment of the revolution, the end of the archaic phase of Athenian political history, the point at which Athenian democracy was born, was a violent, leaderless event: a three-day riot in 508/7 that resulted in the removal of Kleomenes I and his Spartan troops from the soil of Attika.
P217
In the period from 510 to 507 the political battlefield of Athens was not disputed between men who called themselves or thought of themselves as oligarchs and democrats, but rather between rival aristocrats.
P218
by 510-508 B.C.E. the ordinary Athenian male had come a long way from the status of politically passive client of a great house. He saw himself as a citizen rather than as a subject and at least some part of his loyalty was owed to the abstraction ''Athens."
And yet the political institutions in which an Athenian man could express his developing sense of citizenship were, in early 508, still quite rudimentary and were still dominated by the elite.
It seems a reasonable guess that it was in the Assembly (although not necessarily uniquely here) that he allied himself to the demos, by proposing (and perhaps actually passing) constitutional reforms.
By these propositions and/or enactments Kleisthenes gained political influence and so Isagoras began to get the worst of it (Hdt. 5.69.270.1).
P220
Athens twice had been occupied by an outside power and the Athenians had rejected the rule of a narrow elite in favor of a radical program of political reforms, risen up successfully against their occupiers when the reform program was threatened, institutionalized the reforms, defended the new political order against external aggression, and were on the road to democracy.
Among views of Kleisthenes in the scholarly literature, two dominate the field, at least in the English-speaking world.
One, well represented by David M. Lewis's influential article in Historia, is what we might call the "cynical realist" view, which holds that Kleisthenes was no true friend of the Athenian demos, but instead he benefited (or at least intended to benefit) the Alkmeonids by extraordinarily clever gerrymandering in his establishment of the demes. Lewis's "realist" view was advanced to counter the other dominant viewthe "idealist" view of an altruistic Kleisthenes.
This second viewpoint is perhaps best exemplified by the work of Victor Ehrenberg, who saw Kleisthenes as a selfless democratic visionary.
P222 If we choose to stick with the two main sources, we may suppose that the action that forced the surrender of the Spartans was carried out in the absence of traditional military leaders and without a regular army.
How, then, are we to visualize this action? The Athenian siege of the Acropolis in 508/7 is best understood as a riota violent and more or less spontaneous uprising by a large number of Athenian citizens.
In order to explain Kleomenes' actions, we must assume that the riot broke out very suddenly and was of relatively great size, intensity, and duration.
P227
The riot of 508/7 can thus be read as a collective act of political self-definition in which the demos rejected the archon Isagoras as the legitimate public authority.
As Herodotus' account suggests, the riot was the physical, active manifestation of the Athenians having come to be "of one mind" about civic affairs.
This reading clarifies the general role of Kleisthenes in the Athenian Revolution and the scope of his accomplishments.
More specifically it helps to explain the relationship between Kleisthenes and the demos in the months before and after the definitive moment of the riot.
κλεισθένης τὸν δῆμον προσεταιρίζεται I would suggest as an alternative (if inelegant) translation: "Kleisthenes embarked on the process of becoming the demos' trusted comrade."
P228
The sea change in Athenian political practice implied by Kleisthenes' new relationship with the demos was not signaled by an act of noblesse oblige opening the doors of the exclusive, aristocratic hetaireia to the masses.
Rather it was a revolution in the demos' perception of itself and of an aristocrat's perception regarding his own relationship, and that of all men of his class, to the demos.
Kleisthenes acknowledged the citizens of Athens as equal sharers in regard to the nomoi and under the banner of isonomia the men of the demos became, in effect if not in contemporary nomenclature, Kleisthenes' hetairoi.
In sum, Kleisthenes was not so much the authoritative leader of the revolution as he was a highly skilled interpreter of statements made in a revolutionary context and of revolutionary action itself.
This is not to deny any of his brilliance or even his genius.
But it is to see his genius not in an ability to formulate a prescient vision of a future democratic utopia, nor in an ability to hide a selfish dynastic scheme behind a constitutional facade, but rather inhis ability to "read" in a sensitive and perceptive way the text of Athenian discourse in a revolutionary age and to understand that Athenian mass action had created new political facts.
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.
Having read and understood his complex text, Kleisthenes knew that there could be no turning back to rule by aristocratic faction or at least he saw that any attempt to turn back the clock would bring on a bloodbath and make effective resistance to Sparta impossible.
And so, acting as a good hetairos, well deserving the pistis placed in him (Ath. Pol. 21.1) by his mass hetaireia, Kleisthenes came up with a constitutional order that both framed and built upon the revolution that had started without him.
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