The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [19]
It was during one particularly rancorous squabble, a scant ninety years after Solon’s reforms, between the pro-Spartan Isagoras (an aristos with kratos – a high-born man with power) and the pro-demos, pro-Athenian Kleisthenes that, at the very end of the sixth century in Athens, a Rubicon was (prematurely) crossed.
Isagoras had invited the Spartan army, led by King Kleomenes, into Attica and then on into Athens to oust Kleisthenes – who had a particular taste for reform.18 But Isagoras had miscalculated the mood of the moment. The Athenian people had got wind of Kleisthenes’ more demotic tendencies and liked the sound of them. Returning from exile, Kleisthenes found he had a groundswell of support in his mother-city.
And thus, in 508 BC, the people of Athens did an extraordinary thing. Sheltering the Spartan king Kleomenes – ally of that bullish aristocrat Isagoras – the Acropolis was suddenly, violently occupied by hoi polloi, the common crowd. The polloi (the many) besieged the Spartan king for three days. Kleisthenes had little taste for making his personal struggle with Isagoras another tale for the rhapsodes – the tellers of epic tales who sang the deeds of great warrior men. His was a more pragmatic plan. Herodotus, the ‘Father of History’, records the moment – and you can hear the emotion in his voice as he does so, a mixture of horror and awe:
Then Kleisthenes took into his faction the common people.19
By storming the Acropolis with Kleisthenes’ blessing and support, ho demos, ‘I, the people’, for the first time in recorded history, acted as one, as a political agent.20
And thus a thing that will be called demos-kratia, ‘people-power’, had been invented. The word was first used, as far as we know, in 464/3 BC, but quickly caught on. Wailing newborn boys, signs of the times, were baptised Demokrates.21 Herodotus rolled the words around in his histories like a child tasting something new, something suspicious; the actors of Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women, performed in 463 BC, beat out the concept in poetic metre: ‘demou kratousa cheir’ – ‘the demos’ ruling hand’; ‘to damion to ptolin kratunei’ – ‘the people which rules the polis’.22
The impassioned, emotional way that the people dealt with this new creature in their midst, this female quality demokratia – literally, the power, the grip of the people – was to fetishise her. As with other, troubling, slippery, nebulous concepts (nemesis – retribution; themis – order or divine right; peitho – persuasion), she was personified as a woman. Law-courts were reformed in her name, territories seized. Demokratia became a concept that was potent, promiscuous and manipulated. Even immature, Democracy’s name was taken in vain by orators keen to demonstrate that Athens bettered her non-democratic neighbours. Foreign policy became a series of ideological fixtures: Democrats vs Tyrants, Democrats vs Oligarchs. By 333 BC Demokratia was being worshipped as a goddess.23 For a territory that had been living by aristocratic warrior codes for at least 2,000 years, the rate of change was exponential.
Democracy in Athens in the fifth century was – there is no doubt – a radical development. Every male Athenian over the age of eighteen could, by right, attend the ecclesia, the Assembly, which convened about once a month, usually on that raised, natural limestone auditorium close to the Acropolis, the Pnyx. Up here, where the sun beats hard and the clouds feel close, the active Athenian citizen had the chance to make direct decisions about his city-state’s affairs and ethos: should Athens go to war?