The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]

The financial affairs of the city underwent at this epoch as complete a change as the military: in fact, the appointment of magistrates and officers by tens, one from each tribe, seems to have become the ordinary practice. From this time forward, the senate of Five Hundred steps far beyond its original duty of preparing matters for the discussion of the ecclesia: it embraces, besides, a large circle of administrative and general superintendence, which hardly admits of any definition. Its sittings become constant, with the exception of special holidays, and the year is distributed into ten portions called prytanies—the fifty senators of each tribe taking by turns the duty of constant attendance during one prytany, and receiving during that time the title of the Prytanes: the order of precedence among the tribes in these duties was annually determined by lot.

During those later times known to us through the great orators, the ecclesia, or formal assembly of the citizens, was convoked four times regularly during each prytany, or oftener if necessity required—usually by the senate, though the strategi had also the power of convoking it by their own authority. How often the ancient ecclesia had been convoked during the interval between Solon and Pisistratus, we cannot exactly say—probably but seldom during the year. But under the Pisistratidæ, its convocation had dwindled down into an inoperative formality; and the re-establishment of it by Clisthenes, not merely with plenary determining powers, but also under full notice and preparation of matters beforehand, together with the best securities for orderly procedure, was in itself a revolution impressive to the mind of every Athenian citizen. To render the ecclesia efficient, it was indispensable that its meetings should be both frequent and free. Men thus became trained to the duty both of speakers and hearers, and each man, while he felt that he exercised his share of influence on the decision, identified his own safety and happiness with the vote of the majority, and became familiarised with the notion of a sovereign authority which he neither could nor ought to resist. This is an idea new to the Athenian bosom; and with it came the feelings sanctifying free speech and equal law—words which no Athenian citizen ever afterwards heard unmoved: together with that sentiment of the entire commonwealth as one and indivisible, which always overruled, though it did not supplant, the local and cantonal specialties. It is not too much to say that these patriotic and ennobling impulses were a new product in the Athenian mind, to which nothing analogous occurs even in the time of Solon. They were kindled in part doubtless by the strong reaction against the Pisistratidæ, but still more by the fact that the opposing leader, Clisthenes, turned that transitory feeling to the best possible account, and gave to it a vigorous perpetuity, as well as a well-defined positive object, by the popular elements conspicuous in his constitution. His name makes less figure in history than we should expect, because he passed for the mere renovator of Solon’s scheme of government after it had been overthrown by Pisistratus. Probably he himself professed this object, since it would facilitate the success of his propositions: and if we confine ourselves to the letter of the case, the fact is in a great measure true, since the annual senate and the ecclesia are both Solonian—but both of them under his reform were clothed in totally new circumstances, and swelled into gigantic proportions. How vigorous was the burst of Athenian enthusiasm, altering instantaneously the position of Athens among the powers of Greece, we shall hear presently.

But it was not only the people formally installed in their ecclesia, who received from Clisthenes the real attributes of sovereignty; it was by him also that the people were first called into direct action as dicasts, or jurors. This custom may be said, in a certain limited sense, to have begun in the time of Solon, since that lawgiver invested the popular assembly with the power of pronouncing the judgment of accountability upon the archons after their year of office. Here, again, the building, afterwards so spacious and stately, was erected on a Solonian foundation, though it was not itself Solonian. That the popular dicasteries, in the elaborate forms in which they existed from Pericles downward, were introduced all at once by Clisthenes, it is impossible to believe; yet the steps by which they were gradually wrought out are not distinctly discoverable. It would rather seem, that at first only the aggregate body of citizens above thirty years of age exercised judicial functions, being specially convoked and sworn to try persons accused of public crimes, and when so employed bearing the name of the heliæa, or heliasts; private offences and disputes between man and man being still determined by individual magistrates in the city, and a considerable judicial power still residing in the senate of Areopagus. There is reason to believe that this was the state of things established by Clisthenes, and which afterwards came to be altered by the greater extent of judicial duty gradually accruing to the heliasts, so that it was necessary to subdivide the collective heliæa. According to the subdivision, as practised in the times best known, six thousand citizens above thirty years of age were annually selected by lot out of the whole number, six hundred from each of the ten tribes: five thousand of these citizens were arranged in ten panels or decuries of five hundred each, the remaining one thousand being reserved to fill up vacancies in case of death or absence among the former. The whole six thousand took a prescribed oath, couched in very striking words, and every man received a ticket inscribed with his own name as well as with a letter designating his decury. When there were causes or crimes ripe for trial, the thesmothets or six inferior archons, determined by lot, first, which decuries should sit, according to the number wanted—next, in which court, or under the presidency of what magistrate, the decury B or E should sit, so that it could not be known beforehand in what cause each would be judge. Each of these decuries sitting in judicature was called the heliæa, a name which belongs properly to the collective assembly of the people; this collective assembly having been itself the original judicature. We conceive that the practice of distributing this collective assembly, or heliæa, into sections of jurors for judicial duty, may have begun under one form or another soon after the reform of Clisthenes, since the direct interference of the people in public affairs tended more and more to increase. But it could only have been matured by degrees into that constant and systematic service which the pay of Pericles called forth at last in completeness. Under the last mentioned system the judicial competence of the archons was annulled, and the third archon, or polemarch, withdrawn from all military functions. Still, this had not been yet done at the time of the battle of Marathon, in which Callimachus the polemarch not only commanded along with the strategi, but enjoyed a sort of pre-eminence over them: nor had it been done during the year after the battle of Marathon, in which Aristides was archon—for the magisterial decisions of Aristides formed one of the principal foundations of his honourable surname, the Just.