There is little contemporary evidence for the history of Athens in the decade following the fall of the Pisistratid tyranny. Some drinking songs with political overtones, preserved by the littérateur Athenaeus, who lived some seven hundred years later, possibly belong to this period, a few inscriptions have survived, and there are vases and other material remains which, though they cannot be dated with precision, provide some additional hints. For coherent information we depend entirely on Herodotus and on Aristotle's Constitution of Athens, supplemented by occasional pieces of information in later authors. Herodotus wrote some sixty or seventy years after Cleisthenes' reforms, and the internal history of Athens is for him incidental to other concerns. His narrative has been shown to underlie the historical part of Aristotle's account, written some century and a half after the event, which adds to it the only detailed description of Cleisthenes' constitutional measures which has survived. From these sources the following picture can be reconstructed.

EVENTS 511/10 to 507/6 B.C.

The power vacuum left by the expulsion of the Pisistratids did not make itself felt immediately. Since the tyrants had left the old Solonian constitution substantially intact and were content to have the important magistracies filled by their relatives and friends (Thuc. VI.54.6), the archon Harpactides, though elected while Hippias was still in power, presumably served out his term of office, and it is likely that the machinery of government continued to function.