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

The Dying Pausanias Carried from the Temple

POLITICAL CHANGES AT ATHENS

[478-476 B.C.]

The rivalry of Themistocles and Aristides had been greatly appeased by the invasion of Xerxes, which had imposed upon both the peremptory necessity of co-operation against a common enemy. Nor was it apparently resumed, during the times which immediately succeeded the return of the Athenians to their country: at least we hear of both in effective service, and in prominent posts. Themistocles stands forward as the contriver of the city walls and architect of Piræus: Aristides is commander of the fleet, and first organiser of the confederacy of Delos. Moreover, we seem to detect a change in the character of the latter: he had ceased to be the champion of Athenian old-fashioned landed interest, against Themistocles as the originator of the maritime innovations. Those innovations had now, since the battle of Salamis, become an established fact; a fact of overwhelming influence on the destinies and character, public as well as private, of the Athenians. During the exile at Salamis, every man, rich or poor, landed proprietor or artisan, had been for the time a seaman: and the anecdote of Cimon, who dedicated the bridle of his horse in the Acropolis, as a token that he was about to pass from the cavalry to service on shipboard, is a type of that change of feeling which must have been impressed more or less upon every rich man in Athens. From henceforward the fleet is endeared to every man as the grand force, offensive and defensive, of the state, in which character all the political leaders agree in accepting it.

We see by the active political sentiment of the German people, after the great struggles of 1813 and 1814, how much an energetic and successful military effort of the people at large, blended with endurance of serious hardship, tends to stimulate the sense of political dignity and the demand for developed citizenship: and if this be the tendency even among a people habitually passive on such subjects, much more was it to be expected in the Athenian population, who had gone through a previous training of near thirty years under the democracy of Clisthenes. At the time when that constitution was first established, it was perhaps the most democratical in Greece: it had worked extremely well and had diffused among the people a sentiment favourable to equal citizenship and unfriendly to avowed privilege: so that the impressions made by the struggle at Salamis found the popular mind prepared to receive them. Early after the return to Attica, the Clisthenean constitution was enlarged as respects eligibility to the magistracy. According to that constitution, the fourth or last class of the Solonian census, including the considerable majority of the freemen, were not admissible to offices of state, though they possessed votes in common with the rest: no person was eligible to be a magistrate unless he belonged to one of the three higher classes. This restriction was now annulled, and eligibility extended to all the citizens. We may appreciate the strength of feeling with which such reform was demanded, when we find that it was proposed by Aristides, a man the reverse of what is called a demagogue, and a strenuous friend of the Clisthenean constitution. No political system would work after the Persian War, which formally excluded “the maritime multitude” from holding magistracy. We rather imagine that election of magistrates was still retained, and not exchanged for drawing lots until a certain time, though not a long time, afterwards. That which the public sentiment first demanded was the recognition of the equal and open principle: after a certain length of experience, it was found that poor men, though legally qualified to be chosen, were in point of fact rarely chosen: then came the lot, to give them an equal chance with the rich. The principle of sortition, or choice by lot, was never applied, as we have before remarked, to all offices at Athens—never, for example, to the strategi, or generals, whose functions were more grave and responsible than those of any other person in the service of the state, and who always continued to be elected by show of hands.

And it was probably about this period, during the years immediately succeeding the battle of Salamis,—when the force of old habit and tradition had been partially enfeebled by so many stirring novelties,—that the archons were withdrawn altogether from political and military duties, and confined to civil or judicial administration. At the battle of Marathon, the polemarch is a military commander, president of the ten strategi: we know him afterwards only as a civil magistrate, administering justice to the metics, or non-freemen, while the strategi perform military duties without him. The special and important change which characterised the period immediately succeeding the battle of Salamis, was the more accurate line drawn between the archons and the strategi; assigning the foreign and military department entirely to the strategi, and rendering the archons purely civil magistrates,—administrative as well as judicial. It was by some such steps that the Athenian administration gradually attained that complete development which it exhibits in practise during the century from the Peloponnesian War downward, to which nearly all our positive and direct information relates.

THE DOWNFALL OF THEMISTOCLES

[476-472 B.C.]

With this expansion both of democratical feeling and of military activity at Athens, Aristides appears to have sympathised; and the popularity thus insured to him, probably heightened by some regret for his previous ostracism, was calculated to acquire permanence from his straightforward and incorruptible character, now brought into strong relief from his function as assessor to the new Delian confederacy. On the other hand, the ascendency of Themistocles, though so often exalted by his unrivalled political genius and daring, as well as by the signal value of his public recommendations, was as often overthrown by his duplicity of means and unprincipled thirst for money. New political opponents sprang up against him, men sympathising with Aristides, and far more violent in their antipathy than Aristides himself. Of these, the chief were Cimon, son of Miltiades and Alcmæon; moreover, it seems that the Lacedæmonians, though full of esteem for Themistocles immediately after the battle of Salamis, had now become extremely hostile to him—a change which may be sufficiently explained from his stratagem respecting the fortifications of Athens, and his subsequent ambitious projects in reference to the Piræus. The Lacedæmonian influence, then not inconsiderable in Athens, was employed to second the political combinations against him. He is said to have given offence by manifestations of personal vanity, by continual boasting of his great services to the state, and by the erection of a private chapel, close to his own house, in honour of Artemis Aristobule, or Artemis of admirable counsel; just as Pausanias had irritated the Lacedæmonians by inscribing his own single name on the Delphian tripod, and as the friends of Aristides had displeased the Athenians by endless encomiums upon his justice.

ARISTIDES AND THE PEASANT

But the main cause of his discredit was the prostitution of his great influence for arbitrary and corrupt purposes. In the unsettled condition of so many different Grecian communities, recently emancipated from Persia, when there was past misrule to avenge, wrong-doers to be deposed and perhaps punished, exiles to be restored, and all the disturbance and suspicions accompanying so great a change of political condition as well as of foreign policy, the influence of the leading men at Athens must have been great in determining the treatment of particular individuals. Themistocles, placed at the head of an Athenian squadron and sailing among the islands, partly for the purposes of war against Persia, partly for organising the new confederacy, is affirmed to have accepted bribes without scruple, for executing sentences just and unjust, restoring some citizens, expelling others, and even putting some to death. We learn this from a friend and guest of Themistocles, the poet Timocreon of Ialysus in Rhodes, who had expected his own restoration from the Athenian commander, but found that it was thwarted by a bribe of three talents from his opponents; so that he was still kept in exile on the charge of medism. The assertions of Timocreon, personally incensed on this ground against Themistocles, are doubtless to be considered as passionate and exaggerated: nevertheless, they are a valuable memorial of the feelings of the time, and are far too much in harmony with the general character of this eminent man to allow of our disbelieving them entirely. Timocreon is as emphatic in his admiration of Aristides as in his censure of Themistocles, whom he denounces as “a lying and unjust traitor.”