Athens invents democracy

In 508 BCE, two years after Spartan troops had driven the tyrant Hippias out of Athens, two noblemen were fighting for the city. Isagoras, a friend of the old tyrants, won the chief magistracy for the year 508/507; his rival Cleisthenes, of the Alcmaeonid family, was losing in the clubs of the nobles and, as Herodotus puts it, took the people into his party, promising to hand them the government. Isagoras answered by calling in King Cleomenes of Sparta, who sent a herald demanding the banishment of Cleisthenes and his 'accursed' family, then came himself with a small force, expelled seven hundred households and tried to dissolve the Council and give the state to Isagoras and three hundred friends. The Council refused. The ordinary Athenians took up arms, shut the Spartans and Isagoras on the Acropolis, besieged them for two days, let them go under truce on the third, executed Isagoras's followers and recalled Cleisthenes and the exiles.

Cleisthenes's reforms, carried through in 508/507, rebuilt the state from the bottom up. The four old tribes, run by the noble clans, gave way to ten new ones named after heroes chosen by the oracle at Delphi; each was stitched together from three 'thirds', one from the city, one from the coast and one inland, so that no region and no family could own a tribe. The villages and city wards of Attica, the 139 demes, became the unit of citizenship: a man was registered in his deme at eighteen and called by its name rather than his father's. A new Council of 500, fifty from each tribe chosen by lot for a year, prepared the business of the Assembly of all citizens, which from now on met on the Pnyx, the hill facing the Acropolis. The Athenians called the new order isonomia, equality before the law; the word demokratia, 'the people's power', is first found about fifty years later.

Athens had been moving this way for a century: Draco wrote the laws down in 621, Solon in 594 abolished debt-slavery and gave the poorest a vote in the Assembly and a court of the people, and the tyranny of Peisistratus and his sons, from 546 to 510, broke the power of the great families while it lasted. After Cleisthenes the democracy kept growing. The generals were elected by tribe; from 487 the archons were chosen by lot, and that year the Athenians first used ostracism, Cleisthenes's device for sending a dangerous man into ten years' exile by a vote on potsherds. Ephialtes stripped the old council of the Areopagus of its political powers in 462, and Pericles paid citizens to sit as jurors so that the poor could serve. The coups of 411 and 404, in the last years of the Peloponnesian War, each lasted months; the democracy restored in 403 ran until the Macedonians abolished it in 322. It was a democracy of adult male citizens: women, slaves and resident foreigners, most of the people of Attica, had no vote.

Herodotus, writing within living memory, judged the result: under the tyrants the Athenians had been no better soldiers than their neighbours, but once free, 'each one was eager to achieve for himself', and they beat Boeotia and Chalcis on a single day in 506 and the Persians at Marathon in 490. Direct democracy on the Athenian pattern, every citizen voting in the Assembly, most offices filled by lot, juries of hundreds, was never copied exactly, and its critics, Plato among them, are as famous as its admirers. But the idea that power belongs to the whole body of citizens, and the word for it, come from these two years in Athens. The ostraka, the allotment machine, the bronze ballots and the water clock of the law courts dug up in the Agora since 1931 are the democracy's own working tools.