Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Historical Outline 21
motivated not by patriotic pride but by pique: the tyrant’s younger
brother Hipparchos had made unwanted sexual advances to Harmodios.
So it was the tyrant’s brother, not the tyrant, whom they
slew. And their action did not end the tyranny. That was the work
of the Spartans four years later—a fact the Athenians conveniently
chose to ignore. The episode reminds us that the construction of
national identity is as often as not based upon a deliberate, if unacknowledged,
act of collective self-deception.
The Father of Democracy
The ill-conceived title “father of democracy” is most appropriately
applied to the politician Kleisthenes, who, in 507 b.c.e. ,
responded to what was fast turning into a civil war by undermining
the grip over the Athenian constitution that powerful aristocratic
kin groups known as genê (singular, genos ) exercised. Kleisthenes,
who was himself a blue-blooded aristocrat, made every citizen’s
political identity dependent on the Attic deme or village to which
he belonged. Henceforth, each citizen was required to identify himself
as “X, son of Y, of the deme Z.” Kleisthenes then assigned each
of the 139 demes to one of 10 new tribes. In this way, he broke the
stranglehold previously held by the genê, since regions that had previously
been dominated by a single genos were now divided among
several tribes. Henceforth, aristocrats could no longer manipulate
or intimidate ordinary citizens as they had done in the past. The
new Kleisthenic system was complicated and artificial, but it was
wholly successful in making the Athenian political system more
representative.
SPARTA
Sparta, which is situated in south central Peloponnese, was a
highly distinctive city-state that never succumbed to tyranny. It
flourished in the Mycenaean Period but experienced a decline, like
most other Mycenaean centers, around 1200 b.c.e. We know very
little about Sparta’s history over the next two hundred years. In
the ninth century, however, it began to expand into its surrounding
territory, first northward and later to the south. In the second
half of the eighth century b.c.e. , it made further territorial gains to
the west by conquering Messenia, one of the most fertile regions in
mainland Greece. The consequence for the future course of Sparta’s
history was decisive, because overnight it was made prosperous