From the Beginning to Plato

34 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
upon which Athenian democracy was constructed and the principles on which
modern western democracies are founded have relatively little in common. 48
How justified are claims that Athens’s constitution had a transformative effect
upon her cultural life and, through it, upon the history of philosophy?
Herodotus is unusual among ancient writers in the importance which he
ascribes to the reforms introduced by Cleisthenes in 508/7 BC. The Athenians
themselves were more inclined to claim that their democratic constitution was
owed to Solon, or even to Theseus. 49 Cleisthenes left much unchanged, and his
reforms were in any case very much in the tradition of earlier Greek
constitutions. Strict controls on the duration and powers of magistracies,
insistence on one magistrate checking another, the existence of popular courts
and a large council, are all features that can be paralleled in the early laws and
constitutions discussed above. 50 The power of the mass of the people, both in
assembly and in riot, is likely to have played an important part both in
Peisistratos’ success in factional politics, paving the way for his tyranny, and in
Cleisthenes’ own ability to bring in major reforms. Nor did Cleisthenes
significantly increase the range of those in fact participating in politics. It was
only in the fifth century that property qualifications for office were almost all
lifted, that magistrates came to be chosen largely by lot, and that pay was
introduced for those serving in Council and Courts. Cleisthenes’ achievement
was not to invent new principles, or even to apply old principles more
rigorously, it was to change the way Athenians related to one another.
Athenian politics in the sixth century had frequently been marked by divisions
on family and local lines, and Cleisthenes himself belonged to one of the
families with the longest continuous history of political involvement at the
highest level, the Alcmaeonidae. Cleisthenes added a whole new network of
citizen groupings to the existing network, and ensured that his new groups could
not be dominated by family or local ties, as the old had been. Where citizenship
had previously effectively been controlled by the kin group known as the
phratry, now it depended on being registered in a village community or deme;
each deme returned a fixed number of representatives to the Council; the men of
each deme fought in war as part of one of ten new tribal units which were made
up of men from demes drawn from three different areas of Athens’ territory;
villages bound to their neighbours in cult units were frequently ascribed to
different tribes. The old phratries, old tribes, and old cult units were not
abolished, but they could no longer dominate the lives of individuals. 51
Individuals found themselves part of many different groups, there was no
common denominator between the level of the individual citizen and the level of
the city as a whole. Together with this removal of the individual from the
dominance of the kin group went the deliverance of the city from structures
founded upon the gods. Modern scholars have stressed how Cleisthenes’ demes,
unlike the phratries, were not primarily cult groups, how laws now came to be
regarded not as ‘given’ but as ‘made’ (nomoi rather than thesmoi) and how a
whole new, secular, calendar, dividing the year into ten equal periods, was