Читать книгу The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age - John Bagnell Bury - Страница 48

Solon created the institutions, and constructed the machinery, of the Athenian democracy. We have seen why this machinery would not work. The fatal obstacle to its success was the political strength of the clans; and Solon, by retaining the old Ionic tribes, had therewith retained the clan organisation as a base of his constitution. In order therefore to make democracy a reality, it was indispensable to deprive the clans of political significance and substitute a new organisation. Another grave evil during the past century had been the growth of local parties; Attica had been split up into political sections. The memorable achievement of Cleisthenes was the invention of a totally new organisation, a truly brilliant and, as the event proved, practical scheme, which did away with the Ionic tribes, abolished the political influence of the phratries and clans, and superseded the system of the Naucraries; thus removing the danger of the undue preponderance of social influence or local parties, and securing to the whole body of citizens a decisive and permanent part in the conduct of public affairs.

Taking the map of Attica as he found it, consisting of between one and two hundred demes or small districts, Cleisthenes distinguished three regions: the region of the city, the region of the coast, and the inland. In each of these regions he divided the demes into ten groups called trittyes, so that there were thirty such trittyes in all, and each trittys was named after the chief deme which was included in it. Out of the thirty trittyes he then formed ten groups of three, in such a way that no group contained two trittyes from the same region. Each of these groups constituted a tribe, and the citizens of all the demes contained in its three trittyes were fellow-tribesmen. Thus Kydathenaion, a trittys of the city region, was combined with Paeania, a trittys of the inland, and Myrrhinus, a trittys of the coast, to form the tribe of Pandionis. The ten new tribes thus obtained were called after eponymous heroes chosen by the Delphic priestess. The heroes had their priests and sanctuaries, and their statues stood in front of the senate-house in the Agora.

Both the tribes and the demes were corporations with officers, assemblies, and corporate property. The demarch or president of the deme kept the burgess list of the place, in which was solemnly entered the name of each citizen when he reached the age of seventeen. The organisation of the army depended on the tribes, each of which contributed a regiment of hoplites and a squadron of horse. The trittys had no independent constitution of this kind, no corporate existence, and consequently it appears little in official documents. But it was the scarce visible pivot on which the system revolved, the link between the demes and the tribes. By its means a number of groups of people in various parts of Attica, without community of local interest, were brought together at Athens, and had to act in common. The old parties of Plain, Hill, and Coast were thus done away with; there was no longer a means of local political action. Thus an organisation created for a purely political purpose was substituted for an organisation which was originally social and had been adapted to political needs. The ten new tribes, based on artificial geography, took the place of the four old tribes, based on birth. The incorporate trittys, which had no independent existence, but merely represented the relation between the tribe and the deme, took the place of the independent and active phratry. And the deme, a local unit, replaced the social unit of the clan. This scheme of Cleisthenes, with the artificial trittys and the artificially formed tribe, might seem almost too artificial to last. The secret of its permanence lay in the fact that the demes, the units on which it was built up, were natural divisions, which he did not attempt to reduce to a round number.

It must have taken some time to bring this reform into full working order. The first list of demesmen on the new system decided the deme of all their descendants. A man might change his home and reside in another deme, but he still remained a member of the deme to which he originally belonged. Henceforward in official documents men were distinguished by their demes instead of, as heretofore, by their fathers’ names. All Attica was included in this system except Eleutherae and Oropus on the frontier, which were treated as subject districts and belonged to no tribe.

The political purpose and significance of this reorganisation, which entitles its author to be called the second founder of democracy, lay in its connexion with a reformed Council. As the existing Council of Four Hundred had been based on the four tribes, Cleisthenes devised a Council of Five Hundred based on his ten new tribes. Each tribe contributed fifty members, of which each deme returned a fixed number, according to its size. They were probably appointed by lot from a number of candidates chosen by each deme; but the preliminary election was afterwards abolished, and and forty years later they were appointed entirely by lot. All those on whom the lot fell were proved, as to the integrity of their private and public life, by the outgoing Council, which had the right of rejecting the unfit. They took an oath when they entered upon office that they would “advise what is best for the city”; and they were responsible for their acts, when they laid it down.

This Council, in which every part of Attica was represented, was the supreme administrative authority in the state. “In conjunction with the various magistrates it managed most of the public affairs.” An effective control was exerted on the archons and other magistrates, who were obliged to present reports to the Council and receive the Council’s orders. All the finances of the state were practically in its hands, and ten new finance officers called apodektai (one from each tribe) acted under its direction. It seems, moreover, from the very first to have been invested with judicial powers in matters concerning the public finance, and with the right of fining officials. Further, the Council acted as a ministry of public works, and even as a ministry of war. It may also be regarded as the ministry of foreign affairs, for it conducted negotiations with foreign states, and received their envoys. It had no powers of declaring war or concluding a treaty; these powers resided solely in the sovereign Assembly. But the Council was not only an administrative body, it was a deliberative assembly, and had the initiation in all legislation. No proposal could come before the Ecclesia unless it had already been proposed and considered in the Council. Every law passed in the Ecclesia was first sent down from the Council in the form of a probuleuma, and, on receiving a majority of votes in the Ecclesia, became a psephisma. Again, the Council had some general as well as some special judicial functions. It formed a court before which impeachments could be brought, as well as before the Assembly, and in these cases it could either pass sentence itself or hand them over to another court.

It is obvious that the administrative duties could not be conveniently conducted by a body of five hundred constantly sitting. Accordingly the year of 360 days was divided into ten parts, and the councillors of each tribe took it in turn to act as a committee for carrying on public business during a tenth of the year. In this capacity, as members of the acting committee of fifty, the councillors were called Prytaneis or presidents, the tribe to which they belonged was said to be the presiding, and the divisions of this artificial year were called prytanies. It was incumbent on the chairman, along with one trittys, of the committee, to live permanently during his prytany in the Tholos, a round building, where the presidents met and dined at the public expense. The Tholos or Skias was on the south side of the Agora, close to the Council-hall. The old prytaneion still remained in use as the office of the archon and the hearth of the city.

Cleisthenes invented an ingenious arrangement for bringing his official year into general harmony with the civil year, so that the beginning of the one should not diverge too far from the beginning of the other. The civil year was supposed to begin as nearly as possible to the first new moon after the summer solstice; and the difference between the lunar twelvemonth and the solar revolution was provided for by a cycle of eight years, in the first, third, and sixth of which additional months were intercalated. The ordinary year consisted of 354, the intercalated of 384 days. Cleisthenes, taking 360 as the number of days in his official year, was also obliged to intercalate, but not so often. He adopted a cycle of five years, and once in each cycle an intercalary month of 30 days was introduced. But this month was not always inserted in the same year of the cycle. It was here that Cleisthenes brought his quinquennial into line with the octennial system. The extraordinary official month was intercalated in the first year of the official cycle that coincided with an intercalary year of the civil cycle. The new institution of Cleisthenes began to work in 503-2 BC—the first year of an octennial cycle. The first Cleisthenic year began on the 1st of Hecatombaeon, the first month of the civil calendar; it would not begin on that day again till forty years hence.

In opening the citizenship to a large number of people who had hitherto been excluded, Cleisthenes was only progressing along the path of Solon. He seems to have retained the Solonian restrictions on eligibility for the higher offices of state. It is just possible that he may have set the knights, in this respect, on a level with the Pentacosiomedimni; but the two lower classes were still excluded from the archonship; the third class remained ineligible for another half-century. But this conservatism of Cleisthenes might be easily misjudged. We must remember that since the days of Solon time itself had been doing the work of a democratic reformer. The money value of five hundred medimni was a much lower rating at the end than it had been at the beginning of the sixth century. Trade had increased and people had grown richer.

The new tribes of Cleisthenes led to a change in the military organisation. Each of the ten tribes was required to supply a regiment of hoplites and a squadron of horsemen; and the hoplites were commanded by ten generals whom the people elected from each tribe. The office of general was destined hereafter to become the most important in the state; but at first he was merely the commander of the tribal regiment.

The Athenian Council instituted by Cleisthenes shows that Greek statesmen understood the principle of representative government That Council is an excellent example of representation with a careful distribution of seats according to the size of the electorates; and it was practically the governing body of the state. But though Greek statesmen understood the principle, they always hesitated to entrust to a representative assembly sovereign powers of legislation The reason mainly lay in the fact that, owing to the small size of the city-state, an Assembly which every citizen who chose could attend was a practicable institution; and the fundamental principle, that supreme legislative power is exercised by the people itself, could be literally applied. But while we remember that the Council could not legislate, although its co-operation was indispensable to the making of laws, we may say that its function will be misunderstood if it be either conceived as a sort of Second Chamber or compared to a body like the Roman Senate. It was a popular representative assembly, and from it were taken (though on a totally different principle) committees which performed in part the administrative functions of our “Government”. It had a decisive influence on legislation; and here the influence of the Council on the Ecclesia must be rather compared to the influence of the Government on our House of Commons. But the ratification given by the Assembly to the proposals sent down by the Council was often as purely formal as the ratification by the Crown of bills passed in Parliament.