The Spartans intended to restore the old aristocracy and allow the Alcmaeonids to return to Athens and possibly rule. When Cleomenes withdrew from Athens, the nobles formed a government. Cleisthenes (c.570-c.507 BC), son of Megacles (2) and grandson of Cleisthenes of Sicyon (r.c.600-c.570 BC), headed one of the two noble factions but his rival Isagoras, with the help of the aristocratic clubs, gained the mastery and was elected chief archon in 508 BC.
Cleisthenes responded by making an alliance with the people with a promise to reform the political system through a people-supported dictatorship. Isagoras appealed to Cleomenes who sent a herald to Athens to invoke the hereditary curse of the Alcmaeonids. Cleisthenes and his supporters prudently withdrew; but when Cleomenes arrived with a small force, expelled seven hundred powerful families, disbanded the Council of Four Hundred and attempted to establish an oligarchy under Isagoras, he met with strong resistance and was forced to retire in turn. Cleisthenes returned to Athens and began a program to make a stronger democracy.
To disrupt the political channels that previously had led to tyranny he replaced the four original tribes of Attica with ten new tribes organised originally on nothing more than their area of residence. First he divided Attica’s one hundred and thirty or so demes into three regions: the city, the coast and the interior; these regions did not coincide with the old groupings; the relationship between the city and the interior replaced that of the plain and the hill. He then grouped the demes within each region into ten trittyes (‘thirtieths’), i.e. there were thus thirty trittyes in total. One trittye was taken from each group to make three in each of the ten tribes.
The citizenship and military organisation of Attica was to be based on these units. Solon’s Council of Four Hundred became a Council of Five Hundred, with fifty members from each tribe and individual demes acting as constituencies. The Athenians, fearing a war with Sparta, sought an alliance with Persia, but the act of submission (symbolic gifts of earth and water) by the envoys was rejected by Athens. The institution of ostracism is almost certainly to be attributed to Cleisthenes. During the Pisistratid period the small states of Eleutherae, Plataea and Hysiae between Athens and Thebes, when pressured to join the Boeotian League they chose instead to put themselves under the protection of Athens. Thebes and her federated towns objected to these defections; and Chalcis was in alliance with Thebes. In 506 BC Cleomenes organised a three-pronged attack on Athens. A Peloponnesian force ravaged southwest Attica, the Boeotian League seized parts of northwest Attica, and Chalcis attacked in the northeast. When the Peloponnesian force withdrew, the Athenians turned to defeat the Boeotian army, and on the same day defeated the Chalcidian army in Euboea. Athens annexed part of Chalcis’ territory and thus threatened Boeotia on two sides. Thebes countered by allying with Aegina. Athens now faced the enmity of Boeotia, Aegina and Sparta.
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