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

We are also inclined to believe that the senate of Five Hundred, as constituted by Clisthenes, was taken, not by election, but by lot, from the ten tribes, and that every citizen became eligible to it. Election for this purpose—that is, the privilege of annually electing a batch of fifty senators, all at once, by each tribe—would probably be thought more troublesome than valuable; nor do we hear of separate meetings of each tribe for purposes of election. Moreover, the office of senator was a collective, not an individual office; the shock, therefore, to the feelings of semi-democratised Athens, from the unpleasant idea of a poor man sitting among the fifty prytanes, would be less than if they conceived him as polemarch at the head of the right wing of the army, or as an archon administering justice.

A further difference between the constitution of Solon and that of Clisthenes is to be found in the position of the senate of Areopagus. Under the former, that senate had been the principal body in the state, and he had even enlarged its powers; under the latter, it must have been treated at first as an enemy, and kept down. For as it was composed only of all the past archons, and as, during the preceding thirty years, every archon had been a creature of the Pisistratidæ, the Areopagites collectively must have been both hostile and odious to Clisthenes and his partisans, perhaps a fraction of its members might even retire into exile with Hippias. Its influence must have been sensibly lessened by the change of party, until it came to be gradually filled by fresh archons springing from the bosom of the Clisthenean constitution. But during this important interval, the new-modelled senate of Five Hundred, and the popular assembly, stepped into that ascendency which they never afterwards lost. From the time of Clisthenes forward, the Areopagites cease to be the chief and prominent power in the state: yet they are still considerable; and when the second fill of the democratical tide took place, after the battle of Platæa, they became the focus of that which was then considered as the party of oligarchical resistance. We have already remarked that the archons, during the intermediate time (about 509-477 B.C.), were all elected by the ecclesia, not chosen by lot, and that the fourth (or poorest and most numerous) class on the census were by law then ineligible; while election at Athens, even when every citizen without exception was an elector and eligible, had a natural tendency to fall upon men of wealth and station. We thus see how it happened that the past archons, when united in the Senate of Areopagus, infused into that body the sympathies, prejudices, and interests of the richer classes. It was this which brought them into conflict with the more democratical party headed by Pericles and Ephialtes, in times when portions of the Clisthenean constitution had come to be discredited as too much imbued with oligarchy.

One other remarkable institution, distinctly ascribed to Clisthenes, yet remains to be noticed—the Ostracism. It is hardly too much to say that, without this protective process, none of the other institutions would have reached maturity.

OSTRACISM

By the ostracism, a citizen was banished without special accusation, trial, or defence, for a term of ten years—subsequently diminished to five. His property was not taken away, nor his reputation tainted; so that the penalty consisted solely in the banishment from his native city to some other Greek city. As to reputation, the ostracism was a compliment rather than otherwise; and so it was vividly felt to be, when, about ninety years after Clisthenes, the conspiracy between Nicias and Alcibiades fixed it upon Hyperbolus. The two former had both recommended the taking of an ostracising vote, each hoping to cause the banishment of the other; but before the day arrived, they accommodated the difference. To fire off the safety-gun of the republic against a person so little dangerous as Hyperbolus, was denounced as the prostitution of a great political ceremony: “It was not against such men as him,” said the comic writer, Plato, “that the oyster-shell (or potsherd) was intended to be used.” The process of ostracism was carried into effect by writing upon a shell, or potsherd, the name of the person whom a citizen thought it prudent for a time to banish; which shell, when deposited in the proper vessel, counted for a vote towards the sentence.

We have already observed that all the governments of the Grecian cities, when we compare them with that idea which a modern reader is apt to conceive of the measure of force belonging to a government, were essentially weak, the good as well as the bad—the democratical, the oligarchical, and the despotic. The force in the hands of any government, to cope with conspirators or mutineers, was extremely small, with the single exception of a despot surrounded by his mercenary troop; so that no tolerably sustained conspiracy or usurper could be put down except by the direct aid of the people in support of the government; which amounted to a dissolution, for the time, of constitutional authority, and was pregnant with reactionary consequences such as no man could foresee. To prevent powerful men from attempting usurpation was, therefore, of the greatest possible moment; and a despot or an oligarchy might exercise preventive means at pleasure, much sharper than the ostracism, such as the assassination of Cimon, as directed by the Pisistratidæ. At the very least, they might send away any one, from whom they apprehended attack or danger, without incurring even so much as the imputation of severity. But in a democracy, where arbitrary action of the magistrate was the thing of all others most dreaded, and where fixed laws, with trial and defence as preliminaries to punishment, were conceived by the ordinary citizen as the guarantees of his personal security and as the pride of his social condition—the creation of such an exceptional power presented serious difficulty. If we transport ourselves to the times of Clisthenes, immediately after the expulsion of the Pisistratidæ, when the working of the democratical machinery was as yet untried, we shall find this difficulty at its maximum; but we shall also find the necessity of vesting such a power somewhere absolutely imperative. For the great Athenian nobles had yet to learn the lesson of respect for any constitution; their past history had exhibited continual struggles between the armed factions of Megacles, Lycurgus, and Pisistratus, put down after a time by the superior force and alliances of the latter. And though Clisthenes, the son of Megacles, might be firmly disposed to renounce the example of his father, and to act as the faithful citizen of a fixed constitution—he would know but too well that the sons of his father’s companions and rivals would follow out ambitious purposes without any regard to the limits imposed by law, if ever they acquired sufficient partisans to present a fair prospect of success. Moreover, when any two candidates for power, with such reckless dispositions, came into a bitter personal rivalry, the motives to each of them, arising as well out of fear as out of ambition, to put down his opponent at any cost to the constitution, might well become irresistible, unless some impartial and discerning interference could arrest the strife in time. “If the Athenians were wise (Aristides is reported to have said, in the height and peril of his parliamentary struggle with Themistocles), they would cast both Themistocles and me into the barathrum.” And whoever reads the sad narrative of the Corcyræan sedition, in the third book of Thucydides, together with the reflections of the historian upon it, will trace the gradual exasperation of these party feuds, beginning even under democratical forms, until at length they break down the barriers of public as well as of private morality.