Cleisthenes and the birth of democracy (508 BC)

In 510 BC the tyrant Hippias, son of Peisistratus, was driven out of Athens with Spartan help. Two aristocrats then competed for power: Cleisthenes, of the Alcmaeonid family, and Isagoras, son of Tisander. Herodotus (5.66) says that Cleisthenes, who was losing, «took the δῆμος into his faction» (τὸν δῆμον προσεταιρίζεται). The Constitution of the Athenians (Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία 20–21) tells the same story and dates the reforms to the archonship of Isagoras, 508/7 BC.

Isagoras answered by calling in King Cleomenes of Sparta. Cleisthenes left the city, and Cleomenes expelled seven hundred Athenian households named by Isagoras and tried to dissolve the Council (Herodotus 5.70–72). The Council refused, the people rose, and Cleomenes and Isagoras were besieged on the Acropolis for two days; on the third the Spartans left under truce. Cleisthenes and the exiles were recalled. Whatever his personal motives, his programme was carried out by a people that had just defended itself in arms, which is why many historians speak of a popular revolution rather than a reform handed down from above.

Cleisthenes replaced the four old Ionian tribes with ten new ones (φυλαί). Each was named after a hero, all from Attica except Ajax (Herodotus 5.66); according to the Constitution of the Athenians (21.6), the Pythia at Delphi chose the ten from a list of a hundred names. To build the tribes, he divided Attica into three regions, the city (ἄστυ), the coast (παραλία) and the inland (μεσόγειος), and each region into ten «thirds» (τριττύες). Each tribe received, by lot, one trittys from each region (21.4). A tribe therefore mixed townsmen, coast-dwellers and inland farmers, and no regional clan could dominate it.

The basic unit was the deme (δῆμος), a village or a quarter of the city. The usual modern count, reconstructed from later Council lists, is 139 demes; ancient figures differ, and Herodotus' remark (5.69) that Cleisthenes assigned «ten demes» to each tribe is still debated. Each deme had a head, the δήμαρχος, and kept the register of its members, the δημόται. Citizens were now named officially by deme rather than by father, so that newly enrolled citizens could not be singled out (21.4): Callicrates of the deme Paeania, Καλλικράτης Παιανιεύς. Membership was hereditary, so a family kept its deme even after moving away.

The new tribes became the framework of the state. The old Council of 400 gave way to a Council of 500 (βουλή), fifty members from each tribe (Constitution of the Athenians 21.3), with each deme supplying a fixed share. The Council prepared business for the Assembly. Later the fifty councillors of one tribe served as its standing committee, the πρυτανεία, for a tenth of the year, but it is uncertain whether this rotation goes back to Cleisthenes himself.

Other measures followed. In 501/0 BC the councillors' oath was introduced, and the Athenians began to elect ten generals (στρατηγοί), one from each tribe (22.2). The Constitution of the Athenians (22.1) also credits Cleisthenes with the law of ostracism (ὀστρακισμός): once a year the people could vote, writing names on potsherds, to send a man away for ten years. It was first used only in 488/7 BC, against Hipparchus son of Charmus, a relative of the tyrants (22.3–4). Because of that gap of twenty years, and a fragment of the fourth-century historian Androtion that seems to date the law later, some historians doubt that Cleisthenes introduced it.

Did Cleisthenes found democracy? Herodotus, writing about two generations later, calls him the man «who established the tribes and the democracy for the Athenians» (6.131: τὰς φυλὰς καὶ τὴν δημοκρατίην). But the word δημοκρατία is not attested in Cleisthenes' own time, and many historians think the slogan of 508/7 BC was rather ἰσονομία, «equality before the law» or «equal share in the political order». The word appears in the Attic drinking song about the tyrant-slayers Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who «made Athens ἰσονόμους», and Herodotus himself praises Athenian ἰσηγορίη, the equal right to speak, as the reason Athens grew strong after the tyranny (5.78).

The limits matter too. Only adult male citizens took part; women, slaves and resident foreigners did not, and the archons still came from the wealthier classes. Yet by tying citizenship to a local deme register, Cleisthenes gave ordinary Athenians a place, a vote and a share of office, the base on which the democracy of Ephialtes and Pericles was built.