Cleisthenes The Spartans followed their usual practice
and entered into a truce with Athens and installed their own hand-picked
Athenians to lead the government. The Spartans, however, were too clever for
their own good. They chose an individual, Isagoras, whom they felt was the most
loyal to Sparta; Isagoras, however, was a bitter rival of the Alcmaeonids, who
had been the original allies of Sparta. Isagoras, for his part, set about
restoring the Solonic government, but he also set about "purifying" Athenian
citizenship. Under Solon and later Peisistratus, a number of people had been
enfranchised as citizens even though they weren't Athenian or who were
doubtfully Athenian. For in the Greek world, you could only be the citizen of a
city-state if you could trace your ancestorship back to the original inhabitants
of the state. Isagoras, however, began to throw people off the citizenship rolls
in great numbers. Cleisthenes, an Alcmaeonid noble, rallied popular support and
threatened the power of Isagoras, who promptly called for the Spartans again.
The Spartans invaded a second time, and Cleisthenes was expelled, but soon a
popular uprising swept Isagoras from power and installed
Cleisthenes. From 508 to 502 BC, Cleisthenes began a
series of major reforms that would produce Athenian democracy. He enfranchised
as citizens all free men living in Athens and Attica (the area surrounding
Athens). He established a council which would be the chief arm of government
with all executive and administrative control. Every citizen over the age of
thirty was eligible to sit on this council; each year the members of the council
would be chosen by lot. The Assembly, which included all male citizens, was
allowed to veto any of the council's proposals and was the only branch of
government that could declare war. In 487, long after Cleisthenes, the Athenians
added the final aspect of Athenian democracy proper: ostracism. The
Assembly could vote (voting was done on potsherds called ostra ) on
expelling citizens from the state for a period of ten years. This ostracism
would guarantee that individuals who were contemplating seizing power would be
removed from the country before they got too
powerful. So by 502 BC, Athens had pretty much
established its culture and political structure, just as Sparta had pretty much
established its culture and political structure by 550 BC. Athens was more or
less a democracy; it had become primarily a trading and commercial center; a
large part of the Athenian economy focussed on cash crops for export and crafts;
it had become a center of art and literature; the city had become
architecturally rich because of the building projects of Peisistratus—an
architectural richness that far outshone other Greek city-states; and Athenian
religious fesitivals were largely in place. The next one hundred years would be
politically and culturally dominated by Athens; the event that would catapult
Athens to the center of the Greek world was the invasion of the Persians in 490
BC.
Tom Cameron on 14 Aug 08developed their control over the Peloponnesus, the city-state of Athens controlled the area of the Attic Peninsula, to the east and northeast of Sparta. Athens was similar to other city-states of the period of the Greek Renaissance with two important differences: (1) it was larger both geographically and in terms of its population and (2) those people it conquered were not reduced to servitude - this was the rule at Sparta. So, Athens never faced the problem of trying to control a large population of angry and sometimes violent subjects. This also explains why Sparta had to remain an intensely militaristic state. Around the year 600 B.C., and while Lycurgus was reforming the legal system of the Spartan state, Athens faced a deepening political crisis. Those farmers who supplied the city-state with food could not keep up with demand because the Athenian population had grown too quickly. Farmers began to trade their land to obtain food and quickly went bankrupt as they traded away their last piece of land. The crisis was solved in 594 B.C. when the Athenians gave control over to Solon (c.640-c.559 B.C.), a former high official. In his role as archon, Solon cancelled all agricultural debts and announced that all slaves were free. He also passed constitutional reforms that divided Athenian subjects into four classes based on their annual agricultural production rather than birth. Members of the three highest orders could hold public office. Solon's system excluded all those people who did not own any productive land - women, children, slaves, resident aliens, artisans and merchants. However, with the constitutional reforms of Solon, men from newer and less-established families could work their way up economically and achieve positions of political leadership. Solon did not end the agricultural crisis in Greece and so factional strife remained. In 561, the former military leader Pisistratus (c.600-527 B
