Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of text-figures
- List of chronological tables
- Preface
- PART I THE PERSIAN EMPIRE
- PART II THE GREEK STATES
- 4 The tyranny of the Pisistratidae
- 5 The reform of the Athenian state by Cleisthenes
- 6 Greece before the Persian invasion
- 7 Archaic Greek society
- 8 The Ionian Revolt
- 9 The expedition of Datis and Artaphernes
- 10 The expedition of Xerxes
- 11 The liberation of Greece
- PART III THE WEST
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Index
- Map 1. The Achaemenid empire
- Map 6. Central Asia
- Map 9. The Black Sea area
- Map 11. Egypt
- Map 13. Greek and Phoenician trade in the period of the Persian Wars
- Map 15. Greece and the Aegean
- Map 18. Northern and Central Italy
- Map 19. Central and Southern Italy
- References
5 - The reform of the Athenian state by Cleisthenes
from PART II - THE GREEK STATES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of text-figures
- List of chronological tables
- Preface
- PART I THE PERSIAN EMPIRE
- PART II THE GREEK STATES
- 4 The tyranny of the Pisistratidae
- 5 The reform of the Athenian state by Cleisthenes
- 6 Greece before the Persian invasion
- 7 Archaic Greek society
- 8 The Ionian Revolt
- 9 The expedition of Datis and Artaphernes
- 10 The expedition of Xerxes
- 11 The liberation of Greece
- PART III THE WEST
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Index
- Map 1. The Achaemenid empire
- Map 6. Central Asia
- Map 9. The Black Sea area
- Map 11. Egypt
- Map 13. Greek and Phoenician trade in the period of the Persian Wars
- Map 15. Greece and the Aegean
- Map 18. Northern and Central Italy
- Map 19. Central and Southern Italy
- References
Summary
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Ancient History , pp. 303 - 346Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988
References
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