História da Grécia Antiga #12 com Donald Kagan, de Yale

Pyrus died in 527 with all his uh Power uh and so far as we know peacefully and was succeeded in the Tyranny uh over Athens by his uh Sons by his first wife hippus who was the Elder and hipparchus I think it's it's reasonable to think it's proper to think of hippus as the man in charge uh but Hipp parcus shared considerable amount of his uh Power and Responsibility at first it appears that they ruled in the same way that their father had which was to say one that was uh moderate and uh didn't cause

a great deal of opposition in Athens and of course there always was a certain amount of opposition we should not forget that aristocratic families always vying for their own power in their own position were uncomfortable very often under uh piscus and different Ones different families got into trouble and were driven out and our old friends the alanada got into trouble again were banished in the time of the um sons of pyrus and it was necessary to for to have um a battle against them in which they were defeated and driven out that will play a

significant role in the future of Athens quite soon but I think it's in the year 514 that a very important event changes the course of things there is a personal Quarrel between the tyrants one of the tyrants actually and one of the noble young men which results in a plot to kill both hippus and hipparchus led by two young men who will become known in Athenian lore as the tyrannicides because in their plot they succeed in killing the younger brother hipparchus although they don't get hippus they themselves are killed the plot fails but its significance

I think comes In the fact that it made hippus thereafter very nervous very concerned about his safety and about the future of his regime and the nature of the regime according to tradition changes and it becomes very harsh and there are uh persecutions of people who are suspected of perhaps plotting or hoping to plot against the Tyranny and that's significant and it's a characteristic event as I told you early on as I spoke about tyranny in General usually in the second and sometimes if they made it to the third there would be opposition the opposition

would make the rule rulers nervous the nervous rulers would then misbehave and create further opposition and that's the story as it happens in Athens one Wrinkle In The Athenian story is that the um alanada who had been expelled from the city always active always thinking um became got into a position of a special favor to the Delphic Oracle when there was an earthquake that badly damaged the Temple of Apollo at Deli the alanada bid for the contract to Reid rebuild the Temple and in the doing of that they spent some of their own money to

make the temple even more beautiful than the contract required which put them in great favor with the priests of deli and they immediately cashed this favor in in the form of seeking their own political Advantage the story as Herodotus tells It is that U their goal was to drive out heus from Athens and the way to do it this time remember they've tried every trick in the world and it hasn't really work and the idea now is to turn to the most powerful military state in Greece and use it for their purposes I'm talking of

course about Sparta and the tale is that whenever the Spartans sent a message to the delic Oracle asking for the opportunity to consult the Oracle the answer that came Back was first free the Athenians well whether that was the reason or he had reasons of his own the very ambitious King of Sparta King cleomes was going to undertake the job of removing hippus from power in Athens quite soon um it's in the year uh 51110 that the Spartans under cleomes will invade ateka uh gain control of the state and remove hippus and withdraw but I'll

come back to that story in just a Moment let me conclude our uh consideration of the Athenian tyranny by looking at what were the achievements and consequences of the year of tyrannical rule many positive elements as was so often the case with tyranny from the economic side this was a period of great expansion of Athenian Commerce trade very strong to the east through the helison and to the Black Sea but Also in this period Athens trades very strongly with the West I mean to say chiefly sis and Italy and in fact up to that point

up to those years roughly speaking Corinthian Pottery fine Corinthian Pottery is dominant in the western areas is no surprise that's always been the case for Corinth but by the end of the of the 6th Century Athenian Pottery has actually outstripped it in the western markets which show you how much this combination Of trade industry uh was changing the character of Athens and making it wealthier and bringing along various elements that of change in their way of life another consequence of the tyrannical experience in Athens was a diminution in the power of the aristocracy and this

again the general story wherever we see tyranny in the Greek World it never erases aristocracy you never see disappearance of the distinction between Nobles and commoners And claims to the aristocracy of birth and descent from the gods it it's always there and even in the most democratic of Athenian of Greek States like Athens for instance it did aristocracy doesn't go away it's not abolished it lives side by side with a democratic Constitution but the do the Domination by the aristocracy the Monopoly of all the powers and influence that they used to have it's not there

and that is a tremendously important Consequence so that when the Tyranny goes away and it's necessary to reconstruct a new Athenian Constitution the answer will not simply be a return to the old days before the tyrants Solon had intervened in an important way and the tyrants had made their contribution too to changes that turned out to be permanent it's uh also true that under the tyrants the local power of the noblemen had been reduced and the power Of the government in Athens which was not dominated by the aristocracy but by the tyrants that was a

trend and one of the issues that would have to be worked out would be what would be the relationship between the localities outside of Athens and the city itself localism has been damaged but not abolished if there are going to be new forms of government that take place one of the consequences one of the Things I should say one of the precursors of that will be to further strengthen the center and weaken the periphery and to continue to uh strip as best one could the influence and power of the aristocracy which was mainly to be

felt in the countryside and to increase the power of some other form of government uh which Center would be in Athens on the other hand because of the reforms of Solon which I remind you pistus and his sons allowed to stay in Place at least in the formal sense um because therefore every year think about it uh people were elected archon people were chosen for a council Law Courts operated all of these things not dominated by the aristocracy but really in the case of the magistracies uh the um wealth was the Criterion remember ever since

so long so that people who were not Aristocrats but were wealthy also participated in those jobs and the council which was open to Three out of the four Athenian classes under Solon meant that people actually went to the council chamber participated in decisions about what was going on to be sure they weren't going to do anything that the tyrants didn't want but 90 95% of the time maybe more Tyrant didn't care so that they were getting this is the point I really want to stress they were getting experience in the business of self-government and when

you do that I Think the history of the world shows that once people have risen to that state where they do participate in their own self-government it's very hard to get them back into a state when they don't anymore that's going to be very difficult to make stick Athens has been moved down the road to uh to self-government as a consequence strangely enough of the Tyranny just in passing I might point out that's not a unique phenomenon uh it it's very Interesting to look back at the the early postc colonial age in in the 20th

century and to see that there were real differences between colonies that had been ruled in a t I would I don't to say tyrannical way but in in an absolute way such as the Congo or other places like that as opposed to places that had achieved some degree of self-government even while they were ruled by European power the the difference was very great The once you the same experience that I'm talking about now that led to U the capacity and a determination to govern oneself was more likely in places where there had been some such

thing India of course is a striking example where the Indians had managed to achieve some degree of participation in the government of their own State under the British who in spite of all the troubles they've had have actually produced a functioning relatively democratic Government in that great subcontinent well that's the sort of thing I'm talking about um so knowing what we now know Looking Backward is possible to say it looks like the Tyranny played a very important role in the transition from aristocratic government to democracy that's not what the tyrants intended they intended to rule

for as long as they could but it was one of the consequences as we will see Well let's turn once again to those alanada who had as you remember a checkered passed in Athens and even under the Tyranny because they had been driven out remember megacles had had his deal with piscus had broken that piscus had broken that deal so he went into opposition he and the alai were driven out but they came back because we find K name on the uh list of archons uh but then they had been driven out again and in

the year 51110 kenes who was leader of the Alan family and political faction was in Exile and was working to get the Spartans to do the job that was done so cleomes takes his Spartan Army in in 510 he drives out the tyrants and then he goes home now the question that confronts the Athenians is what form of government should we have and again there's there's a whole range of possibilities not a whole range there are a few possibilities that one would Be reactionary let's go back to the days before Solon when the aristocracy was

everything there certainly as we will see were people who wanted to do something very much like that on the other hand what are you going to do about all these people of consequence who are wealthy and who have made it to the top but who are not Aristocrats and then what are you going to do about all of these family farmers of whom there Must be more now than ever because of the my suggestion that pistus had taken away land from some exiled Aristocrats and distributed among um families some of whom were successful on farms

and became hoplight soldiers and independent Farmers they're not going to be enjoy being put back to a position which was worse than they had under the Tyranny because under the Tyranny they were sitting on councils and participating in these things sitting in courts and now That they were going to be take all this was going to be taken away if the reactionary aristocracy had its way that was really what the contest was I think should should uh we continue with the solonian Constitution only without tyrants or should we go back to an aristocracy and the

contest for how to decide that was done in the usual oldfashioned way that is to say in the contest for the archonship the candidates on of holding One view ran against candidates holding the other View and that's where the matter would be cded be decided but they went at it in the old way that is the decisions were being made in the political clubs that belonged to the aristocracy in other words how we're going to do this was being fought out in the with among the aristocrats not among the public at large and in that

contest kones who stood for the more moderate for the solonian let us say Approach as his family had always done lost the winner was a man called isagoras an aristocrat they were all Aristocrats of course and um he engages the I should say by the way we're talking now this Con this uh election takes place after preliminary pushing back and forth in the year 5087 and his victory means a victory for the reactionary program and one of the his First actions is to establish still another Council not the Council of 400 that um Solon had

established but a new Council of 300 and it was to be made up only of aristocrats second very interesting and it turns out very important change introduced by isagoras was to scrutinize the citizens list and then to remove from that list lots and lots of people who were deemed To be uh I guess to say illegally enrolled in the citizen lists they were now going to impose retroactively the traditional Criterion for Athenian citizenship is your father an Athenian citizen but we know that Solon had already broken through that by permitting people to come to Athens

and to acquire citizenship if they had the necessary skills and there surely had been a fair number of those and we are told that the picds had done the same Thing for pretty much the same reason so over a couple of generations you had foreigners coming to Athens and acquiring Athenian citizenship and undoubtedly using it who are now going to be disenfranchised and driven from the citizen lists now that made for quite a few discontented people in Athens if you if you pick the moment after which isagoras has accomplished these two things that is Establishing

the Council of 300 which is obviously going to be the governing body in Athens an aristocratic Council and driven X number of people from the citizen lists then all of those people are going to be very unhappy and very likely they have friends who are also going to be unhappy so you have a situation which is by no means calm and settled but it might have settled out as people as they usually do when things are unavoidable when there is no real Option nobody is making a different case they would have just gotten used to

things I suppose but now kenes decides to do things differently he does not accept his defeat as he would have had to do in the old days having been defeated in the aristocratic contest instead in the words of U Herodotus proon he brought the people into his political faction the root of that first word proar is heta which means means a club a political Club a collection of Companions uh that's the name for these aristocratic societies and and and kenes broke the rules he went out there beyond the aristocratic Circle and he recruited people you

become part of my political faction well why should they because he had a program that was contrary to the one pursued by isagoras it's one that will result when it is successful uh in the establishment of what pretty much everybody agrees was the first Athenian Democracy the reforms that he uh proposed then we we have to imagine he actually went around and electioneered that was not done before that and persuaded people to support him in his programs and then he put his programs through well where did he put these programs through he surely couldn't have

done that in the Council of 300 it would never have passed and he I'm sure he didn't try instead he acted I think as though there was no council of 300 he did what you would have done if you wanted to propose a bill prior to that you would go you would go to the assembly which was the solonian assembly and which had the right to pass laws no doubt it only passed laws that the pyres wanted but it was not something new it was something people were accustomed to and he went to the assembly

and he proposed his laws and they were passed well isakura still had the whip hand and He wasn't going to sit still while that took place and so using the force at his disposal he drove Cleon uh I'm sorry as a matter of fact the force that was at was at his disposal was that of King cleomes in the SP Mars who came back again went called back no doubt what cleomes had in mind when he did what he had done originally driving out the pistes was the establishment of an aristocratic Republic in Athens with

his friends being in charge that's what the Spartans typically would do if they could so he was shocked and annoyed I'm certain when he hears his friends have been somehow pushed out of power and some new fangled kind of of a government that lets Ordinary People participate has been instituted so cleomes comes back with his forces and drives kenes and we are told this is interesting figure I I can't promise that it's right but it does show up in uh in in Herodotus um kenes and 700 Families who must have been in his faction are

driven out of ad out of out of Attica but the people are not ready to take that they resist and they have numbers on their side and they end up shutting up camines and his forces which are not many we're talking about probably hundreds of soldiers no more than that and we must imagine that there are thousands of Athenians out there who are discontent So they shut cleomes up on the Acropolis where he has run for safety uh with isagoras at his side and finally they cut a deal and they go home and Kies and

his uh supporters whom it's fair I think to start calling Democrats have taken over the City by this coup and are ready to go forward now this requires that they establish a new constitution because they're going to have a regime the like Of which no one had ever seen before but in trying to understand this Constitution and it's not easy the ancient sources tell us a lot about it but it's not perfectly clear what's in everybody's mind uh as they do what they do motives purposes are not clear as you'll see in a moment but

anyway what I want you to fix on is this don't imagine that what's taking place here is even anything like the American constitutional convention in Philadelphia pH Adelphia where a bunch of delegates have been selected from here and there and they all sit and argue with each other over the hot summer uh and finally come up with various plans it's better I think to think we're using historical analogies to help us as of course there is nothing better than that to help us um think of the French Revolution think of the convention where the sort

of the mass of the people have gained control of the Situation after driving the king from his uh uh throne and uh after really putting aside a more aristocratic Council that came before it and they sit down with radical people running around ready to kill people this is the outfit that's going to end up killing the King and his Queen and all the aristocrats they can lay their hands on in other words we are in a revolutionary situation and there Force and Terror are in the air and everybody is fully aware of the danger of

this that and the other thing and of of some dangers that probably don't even exist we are in a situation that resembles Civil War that could be on the brink of a serious Civil War and added to that in other words the Athenians who are who will be sitting in the assembly passing the laws that produce the Constitution that Kon he favors are first of all already afraid That the local Aristocrats will use force or guile against them but on top of that there's been two Spartan invasions of ateka in the last couple of years

and this there's nothing to stop King cleomes from coming back again because he doesn't like the way he's been treated I in fact I'd go further I'd say there's every reason to fear that that's going to happen again that's where the analogy to the French Revolution works again because uh Nothing that happens in that the most radical period of the French Revolution is understandable if you don't know that the French regularly expect that the the Kings and Emperors of uh Europe will be marching against them with professional armies very soon and their fear is absolutely

Justified and so is the Athenian fear that the Spartans will be coming so it's in that hot environment where fear is all over the place that this new Democratic Constitution will be shaped and there's no question that I think that the the place where it's happening is in the assembly uh the assembly sits as you I hope you know uh on a hillside in the middle of Athens uh on a hill called the pcks and there in the open air all adult male citizens are eligible to participate in what takes place uh one little point

I'd also suggest to you is what about the people who have been thrown off the citizen Lists are they there my no this is just reasoning I we don't have any hard evidence my my answer is absolutely they are who is going to tell them not to you show up on the hill who's going to kick you off does kones want you kicked out hell no because as we will see one of his main planks is enrolling those people as Citizens so in fact I will bet a lot of money that in all the electioneering

that went on about all these different things they were a group He must have targeted and say you've been unfairly treated by these Aristocrats if I get in power I will see to it that you are enrolled again as citizen so all of that is happening and people are very excited about what is going on that's the background for these rather dry and puzzling details I'm about to lay on you to try to describe what this new what these new laws were that uh amounted to some kind of a democracy the center of them apparently

Were reforms of the tribes and they are in some ways very radical indeed as you know these tribes go back before the birth of History think of any primitive Society you want to it's likely to be divided up into tribes the tribes typically are alleged to come from some very ancient times when gods or Heroes founded them that's certainly true of the Greek uh tribes where each tribe is named after some heroic figure some semi divine figure in the past so There are four the four traditional ionian tribes and that's why this what makes it

even more radical than anything else is that kenes Law changes the tribal system in Athens from four tribes to 10 tribes absolutely brand new things that have no tradition behind them nothing no history or anything and then he has to give names to these tribes and in according to the Greek practice these tribes have to have um some founding hero to be named after So he gets uh picks out I think I'm right and thinking a hundred names of Heroes and he assigns them to the 10 tribes by lot and now we suddenly have 10

new tribes now I mean if you can try to think yourself back to a tribal society and think what a what a disruptive thing this is all my life I've been a member of of the tribe named after ion and so of my ancestors and so my an no more he's not around anymore there's a new Tribe that was just invented that I'm a member of so that's a very surprising thing but that's not the end of the story each tribe now is divided up into three parts they the word for a third is titis

and the plural is Trias and here's the point each one of the each tribe has one of its Trias in and around the city of Athens it has another one in the middle of uh Athens and it I'm sorry in the middle of ateka and in the third is the third of its three iions sorry of it yeah of its three divisions will be in the region called the coast the paralia so every tribe is geographically distributed across all of ATA in this way that is something quite new in the old days we have to

believe that the tribes were geographically separated uh four regions four tribes Um yeah the the um City region the coast region and the Midland region each one of these regions has 10 Trias one for each of the 10 tribes now let's take it a step further the trates themselves are formed of units that are called deems in English that's d m s the Greek word for it is very confusing is damos now the damos is this deem this political unit it also means a Village it also means the whole Athenian people and it also means

only the poor Athenian people so there you are but in the context that we're dealing with it here we we mean these units that are geographical and have a constitutional function uh there is however even here there's a certain amount of uh uh confusion because some of the deemes are actually made up of an Original Village they don't mess with that a dee is the equivalent of a in other words a deem is a deem the two different meanings of the word deem other deems for the Constitutional purpose are made up of a number of

villages so there would be a lot of these old old deems placed into the new constitutional Dee the idea however is that every trus must be of the same size in terms of population because they have your whole Idea is to get each tribe to be numerically equal and that's one reason for that is because the tribes will be the regiments of the Athenian Army you line up and fight in your uh when when you're called to fight in the army uh in your accordance with your Dee which is located in a certain tradition which

is becomes a regiment your tribe is a regiment of the uh Army now they uh get to straight now the deems are unequal in Population but the triat have to be equal so that tells you you have to have multiple deems In Sum and just one or two or a few in another all right it is also true that the triat are assigned to the tribes by lot and the thing I want you to remember I want to avoid as much complication as I can is that it doesn't really matter to the people who invented

the Constitution how the deems are assigned To the tri case except one scholar has suggested uh one motive that strikes most of us as very plausible made a careful study of how the deems had distributed to the Trias uh and compared them with where we know there were important religious sites you know the the Greek religion uh has these many gods and deities and they have local characteristics because they're legends about their having lit on this Earth at a certain Place or done a deed at another place so you have a cave of pan in

eastern uh Attica and you have a a place where Athena did this that and the other thing and the point I'm getting at is these became shrines places where the religion was exercised and in ancient Attica aristocratic Attica the aristocrats own the piece of land on which the shrine was which meant you had to have their permission to come onto it to worship which meant that they would have Predominance power and influence in these areas well what this scholar David Lewis was his name concluded was that there are times when there quite a few times

when the thing is laid out in such a way as to decide the divide the religious sight on on the aristocrats uh land from his main dwelling on that land so the Aristocrat is separated from the place where he has religious clout as a way of dividing up His political influence and power he reads this as one of the ways in which kenes attempted to diminish the power of the aristocracy through its local uh influence now this new Dee is very very important it is the basic unit in the whole system it takes it was

meant I should say to take the place of the frater you remember the Brotherhood that was the kernel of the old tribal system it was meant that the frry uh that the Deem should be the basic thing for instance um one of the most important things was that your citizenship according to the laws of kenes were no longer was no longer to be ascertained by going to your frater but each Dean would keep an official role of the citizens in that Dean so when a an Athenian boy is uh uh born when he reaches a

certain uh age he you have to take him to the Dee and register him and now he can be an Athenian citizen well This was one of several things that we see in K's Constitution that in which the uh intention could not be carried out that is the frater and the notion of the frater as the core of such things was uh never abolished would have been out out out of the question to abolish it at Too Many religious associations and it never really lost its place in the Athenian mind yes your official enr moment

as a citizen was in the Dee but there was still a tremendous allegiance To the frater so it didn't have its and and the frory was still run by Aristocrats so it didn't have its full effect the deem um elected an official called a Demar we could might call him mayor or whatever the local official is called Selectmen we say sometimes still in Connecticut holding to our Colonial Traditions um and the Dee is also given religious functions and religious rights because everybody knows that religion still is Potent even if you're engaged in a revolution in

Athens at the beginning of the fifth century um here's another thing that they tried to do kones tried with a law to change the way in which an Athenian was officially designated it used to be before KES came along you ask a man who are you he would say I am Kines the son of megacles period just the patronymic just like you know uh you Have you bear the name of your father unless you chose to Bear the name of your mother which is evidence of how unian we really are um so um that's the

way it was but under the laws of kenes henceforth citizens were to be designated not as kones son of megacles but as kenes from alopi which is to say his Dee he was to be the Citizen's name and his deem name it was a direct people have argued about what the Point of all this was but I think um one limited point before we get to the full story is simply another way of cutting down the influence of birth in the society it's a way of damaging the aristocratic principle and asserting in its place look

what's really happening here that there is something which is the polus that has nothing to do with birth that is the part of the legal structure which is a polus it's a whole new concept That's really creeping in here uh replacing the old traditional way of organizing Society with one that is the the work of citizens coming together and determining how they themselves will be governed all right let that be the story of the tribes for a moment now here we go with another Council you've heard about the Council of 400 you've heard about the

Council of 300 we can do better than that we're going to have a council of 500 it will be the council that is the Democratic Council for the remainder of the history of the Athenian democracy with the exception of short periods of uh oligarchic Rebellion that remove it but it comes back when the Democracy does and that Council let me simply describe it very briefly it is open to all Athenian adult male citizens membership on the council comes through uh some combination of allotment and Election um the um um the point the point of it

is that an assembly of thousands is not well equipped to conduct all kinds of business that has to be conducted for the state and even its own business you need a smaller group to uh prepare the agenda for a full assembly meeting and so that was the function of the 500 it is and this is very important one of those very Democratic elements the Assembly of course is totally Democratic because all adult male citizens participate if they wish but you can easily get around that in some degree if you have a a council or little

group that actually determines what's going to happen from the first it wasn't so the the um members of the council had to be um I'm sorry the um the council itself was as Democratic as the assembly and so uh we'll come back to that Council later On but there it is in place another thing that happened not in 508 seven but a few years down the road but still in the same period was that by now the the army of Athens which originally had been LED simply by the Palomar the archon who was chosen for

the military leadership had given way to generals who commanded the different tribes and it used to be that each tribe elected its own General but in the new system now each each tribe sorry Back up the entire people elected the generals for each of the tribes another words the 10 tribes still had a general of Peace but the entire population elected him usually he came from the tribe that he was asked to command but not always and again this you can see what the point of this is it has the same characteristic as so much

of what we describing it is going to reduce Particularism localism and make the whole people the whole deos and their representative institutions be the decisive element in the state and that is one of the things as we'll be getting to right next to ask ourselves what's going on here and why is it happening and here's where our sources uh I'll tell you what our sources say and at the end of the day we have to make some judgment of course generally and I think properly The Source get who gets the most Credence from Scholars today

is Herodotus who's closer to it in time than although he's by you know I should point out Herodotus is writing his history sometime or at least he's writing it as late as the 420s but he himself goes back to an earlier part of the fifth century and therefore he is in a position to hear stories from people who go back even into the 6th Century which makes him Theoretically a more credible Source than people like Aristotle who I'll be quoting at you who lives in the 4th century and is uh a good whole Century later

than Herodotus but Herodotus is not of course himself a witness to any of the facts that he uces anyway he asks why did liones of Athens do what he did and his answer is a pretty stale one he was trying to copy his ancestor kones of sikon who also changed the tribes you may remember in Sikon from the old Dorian tribes to new tribes that designated the wrong people like I mean to say the dorians as swine men and assmen and so on um and that that's why KY did it he thought it'd be a

nice thing to do because his ancestor his namesake did the same thing well I don't think we can buy that we move into a more persuasive territory I think when we get to Aristotle who writes in his Politics as follows perhaps a question rather arises He's dealing with the whole question of citizenship about those who had been admitted to citizenship after a revolution had taken place for instance such a creation of citizens as that carried out at Athens by kenes after the expulsion of the tyrants when he enrolled in his tribes many Resident aliens Medics

who had been foreigners and slaves so here's a new story we have to add to the picture I mentioned it in passing but It's very important one of the things kenes does and he he has to do it through measures passed through the assembly uh is to enfranchise the people who had been thrown off the citizen lists um and uh one thing that you want to do and you couldn't have done that given the uh nature of the old Constitution if you hadn't broken up the old system of tribes frates and so on and come

up with a new one which would not have the old Prejudices against it so that's part of the story again Aristotle or one of his pupils is some dispute about the document that is called aanan POA constitution of Athens uh as to whether Aristotle was the uh composer of that piece or one of his uh students anyway here's what it says with the aim of mixing up the population so that a great number would share in the citizenship they came up with this phrase May fulo crine do not judge according to tribe but it goes

beyond tribe it really means do not judge on the basis of birth Aristotle says it was directed against those who wanted to check on family backgrounds he goes on to say this new nomenclature that's what I just mentioned to you before about your name is now no longer the uh son of you are the son of so and so but rather you are Of the deem so and so he says so that they would not by addressing one another by their father's names expose the newly enrolled citizens but would call them by the families of

the Deans this passage caused a great deal of puzzle and confusion among Scholars who couldn't understand what this is all about and that's I think because the topic was mostly treated by by the British but Americans can see this right away if you were best way to put it this way of Course you wouldn't know about this you live in a country who's absolutely pure and without prejudice according to race or color or ethnic origins or religion so you won't know what I'm talking about but let me pass on from an earlier generation a darker

time in which I grew up in which um uh supposing you you a man who came from the abui in Italy and your name was uh joavan D Stefano that was fine in the ABI but uh in America there were people who didn't have a high opinion of people with such a name and were likely not to be opening their doors or uh homes to people like that and so your son instead of calling call himself giovan D Stefano changed his name to John Stevens and thereupon everything was okay that's the way things were meant

to be in Athens that is to say the idea was if you had a foreign sounding name your Father would have a foreign sounding name if he came from a foreign place when he settled in Attica you would be branded in that way and people who wanted and here it was more specific who people who at sometime might want to throw you off the citizenship lists would know who you were but if you took a good solid Anglo Athenian name why you'd be all right so I think that is the explanation and it's all part

of the same Picture taking away the traditional influences that would be anti-democratic and replacing them with things that shattered that and taking away the local Powers anything that's smacked of the past you try to erase as best you can the procedure we all agree is by the device that the Greeks called a pisma it was a motion passed by the assembly and it comes to be the standard form of legislation in the Athenian Democracy the plural of pisma is pism now the scholar who uh I was alluding to a few moments ago uh U Lewis

he's got the general picture right he says we have to understand all of this was passed on the assembly in a mood of great excitement and fear and anger uh a revolutionary situation in which he imagined alluding to the revolution in uh St Petersburg in 197 uh that they are getting up and shouting all power to the 10 Tribes uh to those of you who were not in St Petersburg but they were shouting was all power to the Soviets um but I think he's wrong it wasn't about the 10 tribes the 10 tribes weren't the

issue I think if they were shouting and I guess they were they were shouting all power to the Ecclesia to the assembly that's where decisions were were going to be made in the future but I do want you to take seriously the notion of the making such A claim and doing so in heated circumstances that are revolutionary because without that it's inconceivable uh that what happened would have happened now let me go back to the Boule it was elected by lot from proportional representation in the Deans all Athenians Greek word for preparing legislation for an

assembly is prois and such a group is called Protic that is uh It prepares legislation the chances are that this Council was more powerful and had more Independence when it was invented than it would later on that's just a a guess but you know you're at the beginning of something there still you're still living in a society in which class distinctions are very clear and very sharp in which the idea of the ordinary citizen taking things into his own hands is new and Scary I think there would have been a lot of difference paid to

the individuals who came from the higher classes and I would guess that they would have been on the list preliminary list that uh that was elected before allotment selected among them and that when they uh propos something to the assembly it would be given greater uh sort of Greater influence on what happened subsequently than would be true when we get down to the full scale Atheni democracy in the time of Pericles forget about it the Boule is the servant of the assembly without question the assembly can if you if the if the uh Council sends

in a proposed law in certain Lin language the assembly can vote it down or they can send it back to the Boule and say no we don't like those words change the words into this direction and send it back to us that's the way it was in the full democracy my guess is it wasn't that way in the year 505 I think it probably was meant by kenes to be uh a bit more conservative uh without being of course in any way reactionary now what is this all about in the largest sense Lewis suggests that

there's something here that is personal and political and I think he's right one of the elements that He suggests is these deems were not assigned to Trias accidentally as I've suggested already But were carefully laid out not only to deprive noblemen of their uh undue influence but he thinks probably to help kenes and his alchem anadi to have a powerful voice in as much of ATA as he possibly could why in the world would anybody doubt that that strikes me as being so I mean that's what people do when they have the power to help

themselves politically they do I would guess in other words kenes was thinking of his Own political position in part again we don't have hard evidence for this but just a reasonable suggestion now the other thing is we have to we have to I think believe that the this whole program of Reform was supported by what we have been referring to All Along the hoplight class these independent Farmers they are the ones who are most numerous they are I mean among those who will be politically active Also they are of course the defense of Athens now

they have to be taken very seriously and they are not about to allow themselves to be cut out or to have their own influence diminished by things that are hanging over from the days of aristocracy and so I think we we should think of this most Scholars I think just about everybody does this they like to designate this kenic democracy this first democracy as a hoplight Democracy and saying that the Hop lights were in means that to some considerable degree the poor are out the chances are very great I would say pretty certain that the

majority of citizens I'm sorry yeah majority of Athenian citizens were not hop lights they were theves there probably never was a time when the Hop lights were a majority even in Athens so excluding them certainly is a Limit on what you want to call democracy and here's where we get into sort of the AR debates these days many many scholar now that the uh U the academy is essentially a a branch of the polit bureau um we will want to denigrate uh ancient Athenian democracy and to suggest it really wasn't Democratic well 20 million ways

you can do that you can talk about the fact that it excluded women you can talk about the Fact that it uh um who else do it exclude slave that had slaves excluded slaves that excluded resident aliens uh and all those things and then you can finally point to the fact that probably the majority of the adult male citizens were excluded from some important elements in the uh democracy although as time passes that last disappears and you have pretty much complete participation by the poor but in kony's case that's not so but I think That's

to be deliberately blind to what's really happening what you have is a miracle nothing in the world that we know of anywhere ever like this has never been seen before the reaction of the other Greeks as best we can figure out was horror this is wild and crazy the stuff that the Athenians are doing it is radical it is dangerous we must contain ourselves and avoid being in touch with them but or we should try to Finish those guys off certainly that was the attitude the Spartans typically had towards it and undoubtedly the normal Greek

government which was an an oligarchy certainly took the same point of view so I think you can look at it from either direction probably should look at them from both but don't miss the point that What's Happening Here is of this very special character what did they call this constitution well we don't know but the Chances are great that they did not call it democracy the word democracy our word democracy comes from the Greek democa which I guess you would want to translate as something like power for the masses for the the people at large

the people as a whole but it was a name that was given to the Athenian Constitution by people who didn't like it what do they think of themselves well Herodotus refers to this regime as one of Isonomia equality of Law and I think the the thing that's most important about it is equality before the law that is something that wipes out distinctions among classes of people on the basis uh in when it comes to the law every man who comes before the law is equal to every other man well that's a very big change that

no place else in the world had and I think that's not a bad way to think of it and one of the principles that belong from the First to this de rcy uh and was maybe as crucial as anything in characterizing it was what they called eor equality well equality of speech really it meant equality of the opportunity to address the political body meaning the assembly every Athenian male from the first adult who W um regardless of what his money rating was of his class whether he was a the or higher everyone had the right

to speak in the assembly Now this had been a right that was limited of course to Aristocrats in many cities or to the wealthy in other cities but we know from the some of the poems in the fifth in the sixth Century it was prized as the evidence that an individual was a free man as opposed to a slave he could get up in the center that was the term they used of the Town meaning wherever the meeting place was and then speak his mind and also try to persuade his fellow citizens To do as

he thought best we should not take this lightly in our world where we never imagine ourselves in such a situation uh it's hard to grasp but actually the think if I want to I can get out there during the debate that's going to decide what happens and I can say what I have to say so freedom of speech very very Central to uh uh to the Athenian idea of self-government um the role of the uh Boule in place of aristocratic councils Enhances the Democracy there uh on the other hand things did not happen that you

might think would happen nothing was done in the sphere of the economy there was no change in solonian classes or privileges you still had to have a certain amount of money to be elected to the top things in the state the areopagus was left untouched remaining a collection of former magistrates all of whom had been Aristocrats the frates the home of ARIS stracy were left intact you had this hoplight democracy which was indeed democracy but we must imagine I think all the evidence would support this imagination that it was a differential democracy in which the

lower classes uh still looked up to the upper classes for leadership and guidance and they themselves did not hold leading positions in the state I think that's the picture we have well Let me turn at last to one of the most to to my mind one of the most interesting features of the uh Constitution introduced by kones gives us a picture of how things worked that we wouldn't get any any other way I'm talking about the law that was passed uh on ostracism our word ostracism derives from it but it's something quite different if you

somebody says we're going to ostracize this guy today it Means we're not going to invite him for a drink we're not going to go to his parties things like that now this was something far different and was a central part of the political system let me Begin by simply describing how it worked every year let us say in the month of January that's the way the Athenian calendar Would Have Made It come out more or less typically a vote automatically came up a a question came Up in the assembly automatically nobody had to move it

it was an automatic thing question was shall we have an ostracism this year now they could debate that question but what they were not debating was who should we ostracize that was not an issue the only prin question was should we have one this year and if a majority said yes then they would go on if the majority said no that was it no ostracism that year but supposing a Majority had voted for an ostracism now we go to roughly the month of March and let's go down to the center of town the agar which

is the marketplace which is the political Center which is where people go to talk and all those things that's where the action is and for that day in that day alone the agara is fenced off and there are 10 gates in the fences one for each tribe and uh every citizen who wishes goes with a piece of broken pottery Someone has described it as the scrap paper of antiquity and with whatever you could get piece of glass a crayon or whatever you would simply write the name of a man that you would like to see

ostracized that year you would go to the gate there would be some people at the gate who would Jud would identify are you really a citizen where you come from that you handed in your ostron and you went inside the agara where you stayed Until the voting was over so that you couldn't come back and vote again they were cleverer than the people of Florida are today uh so now it's over the time has come and what they do is they divide up all the ostria that have been cast and they don't divide them up

I'm sorry they put them in a big pile and count them if there are fewer than 6,000 ballots nobody gets Ostracized if there are 6,000 or more now they divide them up into piles and the one who gets the most votes not majority just the highest number of votes plurality he wins he gets ostracized what does that mean it means that he must leave Atta for at a certain distance from Atta too for 10 years that's all he has been accused of no crime therefore he has been convicted Of no crime uh nothing is done

to his property nothing is done to his family at the end of 10 years he may come back and and it's as though he never left the next day if he wants to he can run for public office that's all that is ostracism what's this all about what are the purposes of this thing well I think the best way to come at this is to tell you a couple of stories and some Facts the story I guess it comes from plutarch's Life of aristes who is one of the leading Athenian figures at the early part

of the fifth century and who in fact was a man who was ultimately ostracized the story goes like this it's ostracism day in Athens and some country bumpkin some rubbe comes walking up and he spots areses chatting with some folks and he he goes up to Aros he says excuse me Sir I don't know how to write would you please write a name on this sh for me arestis of course a gentleman he says certainly sir what name would you like he said arises please oh he says wres down aristes and by the way he

said what is it that you have against aristes by uh I should have told you that aristes had earned the soque uh the just arises the just so the guy says uh what have you got against areses I have nothing against s side I've never seen The man don't know him I'm just so damn tired of hearing him called the just the point of that story is to illustrate plutarch's point is that um uh the system of ostracism was just a piece of silly foolishness that you would ass associate with democracy which just allowed the

jealousy of the ordinary man for Superior people to determine what's going on that's the message that plutar gets uh from that tale here's another piece of information That's not a tale I think it was about 1937 38 an American archaeologist was working up on the North Slope of the Acropolis and he came upon a Well he dug into the well and out came 191 inscribed pochards ostar with but one name written on all of them and that name was theistic who we we know was a participant in a batch of ostria in the 480 ostracism

in the 480 and careful Analysis of the handwriting indicated that these 191 ostrica were inscribed by 14 Hands writing them this begins to sound familiar to you guys I suppose it's the best guess of everybody who studies these things is that we do not have here the remains of a collection of Voters who voted and had their votes counted and then this came up but rather that these were votes that never were cast actually so what's going on here now I I Turn from my attempt at a factual account of what happened in the past

to fiction the rest of this is my imagination and we find ourselves uh down the middle of Athens the day before the ostracism we are in the home of uh John the Potter who is a charter member of the aristes political club and what they are doing is sitting about chatting as they insize or paint the name Onto uh a um ostron the name is the mystically next day down there outside the AG are various country bumpkins and others wandering into town and you step up to one of them and say yeah perhaps you would

like to vote in the ostracism today sir I can save you the trouble of inscribing your ballot here's one right now I think this is pretty good evidence that we're talking about organized political Activities which in fact I think totally squares with what we know about the U uh purpose of AUST ISM um I should tell you one other thing that toddies himself says something very important about this he says ostracism was brought about because of the fear and the insecurity that the Athenians felt about their democracy that it was in constant danger and that

they needed something to help them that's the context in which he views it plutar as I Say has a more General uh Story the envy and jealousy natural to democracy you must IM realize that hardly anybody who ever wrote anything in Antiquity had a kind word to say for democracy it is a it's a bad thing from the standpoint of most of the authors of antiquity but thiddies was there while ostracism was a reality as opposed to Plutarch and uh I'm sure he is right let's look first of all at the moment when ostracism was

invented in The time of kenes and before we move beyond that what's the situation kenes and Company have just brought about this unique amazing and to the rest of the world dangerous couet and invented this new wild crazy kind of government they know that the Spartans are Furious and they expect they're going to come down anytime they also know that in Athens there are people who don't like this new government some of them are The Heirs to the old aristocracy some of them are Aristocrats themselves uh others were very happy in the days of the

tyranny in fact there are still relatives of the tyrants eminent ones who are uh still in Athens in other words they have to fear uh betrayal they have to fear intern hostility they have to fear people might start a Civil War at the same time as they have to be afraid of the Spartans coming up the road and we know because in a few years this is going to happen they have enemies of Other neighboring states Corinthians the eretrians uh others will be oans Thieves in within the next 5 years they will have invasions by

those people as well that's their situation what are they afraid afraid of they are afraid that there will be treason inside the city which will help Invaders or simply turn the city over to them well then why don't they just lock these guys up well in the first place they probably haven't done anything yet and you couldn't make A case against them on top of which you really don't if you're kenes you don't want to treat all of these people as though they are the enemies of the new regime they are in fact now natural

opponents the the friends of the tyrants and the old Aristocrats they're on opposite sides of the argument why would you want to put them together by assaulting their leaders a smarter thing would be to try to win over one faction to support of your side at the uh Expense of the other and that is my guess as to what is another explanation of what's Happening Here so here's another piece of fiction I want to throw you at you I imagine that kenes stops by at the house of hip parus the son of kmus who is

a descent relative of the pyds and who would be looked to as the leading figure in that faction and uh he stops by to see uh hip parcus and hi parus says hello Kon say what is this Routine what is this crazy new law that you and your boys just put through this ostracism law uh I hear in the streets that it's aimed at me as the leader of the old tanist faction what is that KES I imagine would say no where did you get a crazy idea like that I mean that's you're a swell

fellow I'm only against these terrible aristos out there and their Spartan Lackey who are going to take away all the people's rights and I know you wouldn't want that to happen That wouldn't be good that's not like you so uh of course I I can see your point I can see you are alarmed I can see that people might say gee those old H pyrus people might be trying to overthrow this new democracy and bring themselves back at I know hippus is over there in Persia supported by the king and uh maybe people would think

you're for bringing him back as a tyrant I know that would never be in your mind but I tell you what you ought to do why don't You come over to my side and I'll see to it you know I have friends I got a lot of friends I could do you a favor uh you do me a favor I could do you a favor I could see that I would just kill that rumor and everything would be very happy next day uh all is well uh and I think there's considerable evidence I don't have

time for it now not not certain but evidence suggesting that hi parcus came on board and became part of a coalition that ruled Athens For decades after that time and so that year there was no ostracism because there didn't have to be an ostracism I think that is very important most years there was no ostracism only once in a while and every single person that we he ostracized was a leading political figure ostracism in short was meant to be a constitutional device to work in the political realm as a way of Deterring uh Auda treason

or other forms of unrest you could only use it as a politician if you were the popular favorite if you were confident that the ostracism would go your way if you held an ostracism and that wasn't true you might find yourself traveling a long way from home pretty soon and so that's the essence of ostracism and we'll have a look at it again because drops up and is used but not for 20 years after it's invented okay