Cleisthenes (Classics)

Introduction

In 508/7 BCE and the following years the Alkmeonid Cleisthenes reorganized the Athenian phylai and demes. He set up ten new phylai in Athens bringing together the different regions of Attica (city, inland, coastal region) in a complex system of demes and trittyes. He established the Council of Five Hundred and created the office of the ten strategoi. Due to the reform, the civil rights of all Athenians were redefined, and new cults (for the phylai) and festivals (the Great Dionysia) established a new civil identity. A long discussion centers on the question whether we should see the reform in its relation to Solon’s reforms or the preceding tyranny in Athens or more related to the subsequent development of democracy in the 5th century. With regard to the institutional development in Athens, the main question is when democracy in Athens began (with Solon, with Cleisthenes, or later in the 5th century). Fundamental issues of the recent discussion are: How to define roots of egalitarianism and people’s power in archaic Greece? Was the development of Athenian democracy inevitable or already laid out in the reforms of Solon, or was it rather due to external circumstances like the military confrontation with the Persians? What were Cleisthenes’s motives (see An Emerging Democratic Ideology and Isonomia: The New Political Order)? Studies not only of cult, ritual, and performance but also of the archeology of the Agora and especially of the demes of Attica are giving new impetus to the discussion (see Archaeology of the Reform and Cultural and Political Context of the Reform).

General Overviews

Bleicken 2008, Hansen 1999, Hignett 1975, and Ostwald 1986 provide accounts of the history of the Athenian institutions describing the units of the political organization of the Athenian democracy in detail (e.g., the divisions of the demos, the Council of Five Hundred, archons, assembly) and including overviews of the Cleisthenic reforms at the end of the 6th century BC as well as overviews of the further development in the 5th century BCE. Funke 2007, Lewis 2008, Ostwald 2008, Schubert 2011 (cited under Fall of the Peisistratid Tyranny), and Welwei 1999 give an overview of the history of Athens in the time of Cleisthenes and the Persian Wars as well as of Athen’s rise to power and the following conflict between Athens and Sparta. Meier 1980 and Raaflaub, et al. 2007 discuss the general development of Greek political thought, especially of political theory in the 5th century BCE and the invention of freedom as a political concept.

Bleicken, Jochen. 2008. Die athenische Demokratie. 4th rev. ed. Paderborn, Germany: Schöningh.
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Focuses on the systematic description of the history of Athenian institutions; gives historical background and an amply overview of research in the notes.
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Funke, Peter. 2007. Athen in klassischer Zeit. 3d rev. ed. Beck’sche Reihe C.-H.-Beck-Wissen. Munich: Beck.
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Describes the political background of Cleisthenes’s reforms and outlines the reforms themselves. First edition 1999.
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Hansen, Mogens Herman. 1999. The Athenian democracy in the age of Demosthenes: Structure, principles, and ideology. Translated by J. A. Crook. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press.
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Introduction to the Athenian democracy of the 4th century BCE with systematic and historical context of one of the foremost experts on Athenian democracy.
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Hignett, Charles. 1975. A history of the Athenian constitution to the end of the fifth century B.C. Oxford: Clarendon.
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An analysis of the Athenian constitution still stimulating and worth consulting, sometimes polemical and extremely skeptical, not suited for undergraduates. Reprint of 1952 edition.
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Lewis, David M. 2008. The tyranny of the Peisistratidae. In Persia, Greece and the Western Mediterranean: c. 525 to 479 B.C. 2d ed. Edited by John Boardman, 287–302. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Describes the history of Athens from 528/7 BCE, the year of Pisistratus’s death, to the Spartan invasions in Attica 510 BCE.
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Meier, Christian. 1980. Die Entstehung des politischen bei den Griechen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
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Pioneering study, discusses the development of Athenian democracy in the 5th century BCE and the special character of Greek political thought as well as the special Athenian practice of democracy. The English version (1990. The Greek Discovery of Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press) omits the two more narrowly historiographical chapters “Prozess und Ereignis in der griechischen Historiographie des 5. Jahrhunderts v. Chr.” and “Die Entstehung der Historie.” Also see Isonomia: The New Political Order.
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Ostwald, Martin. 1986. From popular sovereignty to the sovereignty of law: Law, society, and politics in fifth century Athens. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Masterly survey of the growth of popular control of government from Cleisthenes throughout the 5th century BCE; underlines the growing importance of the courts in Athens.
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Ostwald, Martin. 2008. The reform of the Athenian state By Cleisthenes. In Persia, Greece and the Western Mediterranean: c. 525 to 479 B.C. 2d ed. Edited by John Boardman, 303–346. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Describes the reforms in the years around 500 BCE with details of the institutional reforms; provides an outlook till 480 BCE.
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Raaflaub, Kurt A., Josiah Ober, and Robert W. Wallace. 2007. Origins of democracy in ancient Greece. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520245624.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Presents an overview of the discussion on the origins of Athenian democracy by five eminent scholars with very different positions. Includes chapters by Paul Cartledge and Cynthia Farrar. Also see Collections of Papers and Isonomia: The New Political Order.
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Welwei, Karl-Wilhelm. 1999. Das klassische Athen: Demokratie und machtpolitik im 5. und 4. Jahrhundert. Darmstadt: Primus-Verl.
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Historically oriented overview with detailed notes. Suited for undergraduates.
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Bibliographies

L’Année philologique contains the complete record of scholarship, mostly with abstracts, lags behind for two years. Gnomon online covers also the most recent years, always up-to-date.

Gnomon online: Eichstätter Informationssystem für die klassische Altertumswissenschaft.
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The bibliography of record for the field of ancient history with a very detailed thesaurus.
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L’Année philologique. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
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The bibliography of record for the field of Ancient History and Classical Studies. In print since 1924 and now online.
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Collections of Papers

On the occasion of the two thousand five hundredth “birthday” of the Athenian democracy in 1993 and for some years thereafter, a lively debate has been conducted mainly in the United States and Athens that is presented in conference volumes: for example, The Cradle of Democracy: Athens Then and Now, hosted by The Alexander S. Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies at New York University held on 21–22 November 1992; the conference in Santa Cruz and Muncie, Indiana (Koumoulides 1995); and the international conference titled The Archaeology of Democracy, which took place at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens on 4–6 December 1992. This conference was the first in a series of events, which included the exhibition The Birth of Democracy, held by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens to celebrate the democratic reforms of Kleisthenes as part of the Democracy 2,500 project (Coulson 1994), and Democracy 2500? Questions and Challenges, held at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC, in September 1993 and published by Morris, et al. 1998. A similar approach is Ober and Hedrick 1996. The debate has since calmed down, but the discussion of the development and the different understandings of the Athenian democracy have experienced a new impetus more in line with the broader Greek tradition as can be seen in Azoulay and Ismard 2011, Kinzl and Raaflaub 1995, Stanton 1994, Rhodes 2004, and Raaflaub, et al. 2007. The influence of the concept “political culture” is emphasized in Ober 2005.

Azoulay, Vincent, and Paulin Ismard, eds. 2011. Clisthène et Lycurgue d’Athènes: Autour du politique dans la cité classique. Histoire ancienne et médiévale 109. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne.
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Eighteen essays in three sections with a fresh perspective on Athenian democracy, comparing Cleisthenian and Lycurgan Athens, with a focus on ancient and modern reception (French and English).
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Coulson, William D. E., ed. 1994. The archaeology of Athens and Attica under the democracy: Proceedings of an International Conference Celebrating 2500 Years since the Birth of Democracy in Greece, held at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, December 4–6, 1992. Edited by W. D. E. Coulson. Oxbow monograph 37. Oxford: Oxbow.
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Stimulating papers given at the conference The Archaeology of Democracy. Also see Archaeology of the Reform.
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Kinzl, Konrad H., and Kurt A. Raaflaub, eds. 1995. Demokratia: Der Weg zur Demokratie bei den Griechen. Wege der Forschung 657. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftl. Buchges.
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Collection of older articles selected for reprinting; especially stimulating is V. Ehrenberg’s “Origins of Democracy” (contains only the part concentrating on Cleisthenes’s contribution to Athenian democracy), Meier’s article on the word demokratia (revised for this book), Martin’s paper on the development of Athens from Cleisthenes to Ephialtes, and Kinzl’s contribution on Athens from the end of the tyranny to the 480s (translated from the English of the original publication to German).
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Koumoulides, John A. 1995. The good idea: Democracy and ancient Greece: Essays in celebration of the 2500th anniversary of its birth in Athens. Edited by John A. Koumoulides. New Rochelle, NY: Caratzas.
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Publication of the lecture series presented at the University of California at Santa Cruz and at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana in 1993.
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Morris, Ian, Kurt A. Raaflaub, and David Castriota, eds. 1998. Democracy 2500?: Questions and challenges. Colloquia and conference papers 2. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.
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Contains full debates around democracy in Athens and America and on democracy ancient and modern.
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Ober, Josiah. 2005. Athenian legacies: Essays on the politics of going on together. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Collection of essays of Josiah Ober; emphasizes the influence of “political culture” as everyday behavior of citizens in the public sphere and within the institutions in the polis organization since the reforms of Cleisthenes. Ober’s main thesis is that a popular uprising preceded the reforms of Cleisthenes and marked a fundamental break from past.
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Ober, Josiah, and Charles Hedrick, eds. 1996. Dēmokratia: A conversation on democracies, ancient and modern. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Collection with double preoccupation: with ancient Athens and the present-day United States.
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Raaflaub, Kurt A., Josiah Ober, and Robert W. Wallace. 2007. Origins of democracy in ancient Greece. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Discussion of the major types of interpretation used in the debate on the question when Athenian democracy began related to the figurative concepts of longstanding evolution, process with incremental change, and sudden rupture. Includes chapters by Paul Cartledge and Cynthia Farrar. Also see General Overviews and Isonomia: The New Political Order.
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Rhodes, Peter John, ed. 2004. Athenian democracy. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Collection of articles on Athenian democracy originally published as long ago as 1924 and as recently as 2001 by eminent scholars; the fundamental disagreement on the impact of Cleisthnes’s reforms is represented by the contrasting approaches in the articles of David Lewis (Cleisthenes conceived and created the new system from the top down) and Josiah Ober (the Athenian demos was the prime actor in a bottom–up process).
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Stanton, Greg R. 1994. Athenian politics c. 800–500 BC: A sourcebook. London: Routledge.
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Chapters organized by ancient key texts followed by two or three scholarly articles, especially suited for undergraduates. See also Sources.
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Sources

The main sources for Cleisthenes’s reform are the Athenaion Politeia, chapters 20–22, and for the historical context the Histories of Herodotus. The canonical Greek text of Herodotus is Rosén 1997. Asheri 1995–2000 is a scholarly commentary. Still well read are the commentaries Wells and How 1975. The canonical Greek text of the Athenaion Politeia is Chambers 1994, to be used alongside the commentaries Chambers 1990 and Rhodes 1981. All Greek texts (older editions) with English translations are available from the Perseus Digital Library online. There are plenty of source collections: Fornara and Samons 1991 and Stanton 1994 contain both literary texts and inscriptions and usually provide translations as a good start for undergraduates.

Asheri, David, ed. 1995–2000. Herodotus: Le storie. 9 vols. Scrittori greci e latini. Milan: Mondadori.
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Scholarly commentary on Herodotus, Volumes 1–4 should now be used with the English translation: Asheri, David, Alan Lloyd, and Aldo Corcella. eds. 2007. A commentary on Herodotus: Books I–IV. Translated by Barbara Graziosi. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Chambers, Mortimer. 1990. Aristoteles. Staat der Athener. Aristoteles. In Werke in deutscher Übersetzung. Vol. 10, 1. Edited by Hellmut Flashar. Berlin: Akad.-Verl.
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German translation with commentary and bibliography; Chambers believes that the Athenaion Politeia is a genuine work of Aristotle, giving Aristoteles’s opinion on Cleisthenes and his reforms.
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Chambers, Mortimer, ed. 1994. Aristoteles, Athenaion Politeia. Leipzig: Teubner.
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Best modern edition (Greek) with apparatus criticus.
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Fornara, Charles W., and Loren J. Samons, eds. 1991. Athens from Cleisthenes to Pericles. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Sources in English; comprises also the most important inscriptions.
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Rhodes, Peter John. 1981. A commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion politeia. Oxford: Clarendon.
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Masterly commentary with line-by-line notes, without translation, still significant in the explanation of the constitutional history of Athens; Rhodes believes, contrary to Chambers, that the Athenaion Politeia is not an original work of Aristotle.
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Rhodes, Peter John. 1984. Aristotle: The Athenian constitution. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
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English translation with commentary and bibliography.
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Rosén, Haiim B., ed. 1997. Herodoti historiae I–IV. Leipzig: Teubner.
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Greek text with apparatus criticus, to be read alongside Rosén, Haiim B., ed. 1987. Herodoti Historiae V–IX. Leipzig: Teubner.
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Stanton, Greg R., ed. 1994. Athenian politics c. 800–500 BC: A sourcebook. London: Routledge.
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Presents texts from Solon to Cleisthenes (only in English) with short commentary and notes relating to the history of Athens and Attica; well suited for undergraduates. See also Collections of Papers.
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The Perseus Digital Library.
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All Greek texts in older editions with English translations are available through the Perseus Digital Library.
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Wells, W. W., and J. How. 1975. A Commentary on Herodotus. Oxford: Clarendon.
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Short commentary, now online via Perseus Digital Library. Includes introduction and appendixes. Superseded by Asheri 1988–2006 and Asheri, David, Alan Lloyd, and Aldo Corcella. eds. 2007. A commentary on Herodotus: Books I–IV. Translated by Barbara Graziosi. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press). Reprint of 1912 edition.
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The Fall of the Peisistratid Tyranny

Peisistratos’s tyranny lasted from ca. 546 BCE to 528 BCE and was continued by his sons. The fall of the Peisitratids’s tyranny shows the typical features of aristocratic power struggles with Cleisthenes as head of the Alkmeonids playing a leading role as presented by Berve 1967, de Libero 1996, and Stein-Hölkeskamp 2013. Two attempts to overthrow Peisistratos’s sons by invasions failed. Meanwhile Harmodius and Aristogeiton slayed one of the Peisistratid tyrants, Hipparchus, but his brother Hippias remained as tyrant in Athens. Finally, the Alcmeonids won the support of the Spartans. The historians of the 5th century BCE, Herodotus and Thucydides, are of the opinion that the Spartan intervention led to the overthrow of the tyrants and not the deed of Harmodios and Aristogeiton. After the first withdrawal of the Spartans, an internal power struggle began between the Athenian Isagoras—according to the Athenaion Politeia, a supporter of tyrants—and Cleisthenes, which was decided by Isagoras who was elected archon in 508/7 BCE. Only then, after that defeat, Cleisthenes decided to promote his reform, the core of which was the reorganization of the phylai and the establishment of a new Council of Five Hundred. A prominent group of interpreters are devoted to the “democratic tyranny” thesis: Lavelle 1993 and Lavelle 2005 versus Anderson 2003 make a case for a “democratic” Peisistratus, characterizing Peisistratus as a “prototype” or “model” for later leaders like Miltiades, Cimon, and Pericles. Forsdyke 2009, Raaflaub 2003, Schubert 2011, and Sancisi-Weerdenburg 2000 favor the rupture in 508/7 BCE as the starting point of a new development or even a radical new development. (see Cleisthenes’s Reform).

Anderson, Greg. 2003. The Athenian experiment: Building an imagined political community in ancient Attica: 508–490 B.C. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
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Makes the case against the “democratic tyranny”; the “Athenian experiment” was in fact a revolution, in both institutions and consciousness, but it was masked as a restoration. The major rupture started 508/7, lasted until 490 BCE, and the outcome was the first truly popular form of self-government.
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Berve, Helmut. 1967. Die Tyrannis bei den Griechen. Munich: Beck.
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Excellent synthesis of evidence and quite broad in scope, ranging in time from the early Archaic to the Augustan periods.
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Forsdyke, Sara. 2009. Exile, ostracism, and democracy: The politics of expulsion in ancient Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Cleisthenes was not only a great reformer but also a brilliant inventor of myths and presented the establishment of democracy as rebuilding an old structure, invented already by Theseus and Solon. Follows Ober in the assumption that a popular uprising preceded the reforms of Cleisthenes.
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Lavelle, Brian M. 1993. The sorrow and the pity: A prolegomenon to a history of Athens under the Peisistratids, c. 560–510 B.C. Historia Einzelschriften 80. Stuttgart: Steiner.
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Argues that Athenian recollections of the shameful “collaboration” with the Peisistratidae were systematically distorted or supplanted by purpose-built “myths.”
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Lavelle, Brian M. 2005. Fame, money and power: The rise of Peisistratos and “democratic” tyranny at Athens. Ann Arbor: Michigan Univ. Press.
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Follow-up of Lavelle’s first book on Peisistratid tyranny (Lavelle 1993): The “tyranny” of Peisistratus and his sons essentially conformed to the norms of “democratic” leadership that had prevailed in Athens at the time.
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Libero, Loretana de. 1996. Die archaische Tyrannis. Stuttgart: Steiner.
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Subjects include, among others, Peisistratos’s rise to tyranny, the means to his success and retention of power, Peisistratid foreign relations, cultural and cult programs and interests, and the events specifically related to the younger tyrants.
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Raaflaub, Kurt A. 2003. Stick and glue: The function of tyranny in fifth-century Athenian democracy. In Popular tyranny. Edited by Kathryn A. Morgan, 59–93. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press.
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Raaflaub argues that the concept of tyranny helped the Athenians to develop political cohesiveness.
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Sancisi-Weerdenburg, Heleen. 2000. Peisistratos and the tyranny: A reappraisal of the evidence. Publications of the Netherlands Institute at Athens 3. Amsterdam: Gieben.
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Sceptical approach to the Athenian tyranny, claiming that our primary sources made major mistakes about chronology, cults, and the Athenian politeia and are formed by lapses and bias.
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Schubert, Charlotte. 2011. Die Entstehung eines politischen Mythos in Athen. Von der Tyrannis zur Demokratie. Behemoth: A Journal on Civilisation 3.1: 132–169.
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Specifically devoted to the heroes Harmodius and Aristogeiton as the symbol of an Athenian founding myth and one of the most spectacular examples of counter-factual history.
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Stein-Hölkeskamp, Elke. 2013. The tyrants. In A companion to Archaic Greece. Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Hans Van Wees, 100–116. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
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Only in an indirect way by forcing the aristocracy out of power did the tyrants contribute to the further development.
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The Reform of the Demes

The Athenaion Politeia describes the reform in chapters 20–22 essentially as a reorganization of the older four tribes into the ten new phylai as pointed out by Chambers 1990 and Lewis and Rhodes 1981 (both cited under Sources). In the wake of the reform, a ten-member group of strategoi was established but probably not by Cleisthenes himself. Kienast 2005a, Bleicken 2008 (cited under General Overviews), and Welwei 1999 (cited under General Overviews) provide an account of Cleisthenes’s measures in detail. The centerpiece of the reform were the ten new phylai: Each of the new phylai sent fifty members to the council and this Council of Five Hundred became the central institution in the government of Athens. Furthermore Cleisthenes divided Attica into three regions (city, coastal region, inland), each of which was further subdivided into ten units, the trittyes. Each phyle was composed of three trittyes (from the three different regions) distributed by lot to the ten tribes. Thus, each tribe should be composed of the three regions of Attica. Siewert 1982 argues that Cleisthenes’s aim in dividing all tribes into equal thirds was a better military mobilization. As Whitehead 1986 describes, the basic units of this system were the individual demes, communities, pooled in trittyes. Traill 1986 analyzes the distribution of demes in relation to the trittyes based essentially on inscriptions of the 4th century BCE and assumed 139 as the total number of demes in the time of Cleisthenes. Herodotus Book 5, chapter 69, section 2 seems to indicate that one hundred demes as the basis of Cleisthenes’s reform, but the text is unfortunately corrupt and because some of the demes can still not be located topographically as is argued by Kienast 2005b, Lohmann 1993, and Stanton 1994, we have still no certainty for the total number of the demes. Today the discussion is more focused on the impact of Cleisthenes’s reforms on Athenian citizenship as can be seen in Manville 1997.

Kienast, Dietmar. 2005a. Die Funktion der attischen Demen von Solon bis Kleisthenes. Chiron 35:69–100.
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Kienast describes the integration of the local demes in the ten tribes as a strengthening of the civic identity.
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Kienast, Dietmar. 2005b. Die Zahl der Demen in der Kleisthenischen Staatsordnung. Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 54.4: 495–498.
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Favors the interpretation that Herodotus Book 5, chapter 69, section 2 has the number of hundred demes that Cleisthenes distributed among the ten tribes. This number fits in the decimal system and was the basis structure of Cleisthenes’ reform.
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Lewis, David M. 1963. Cleisthenes and Attica. Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 12.1: 22–40.
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Cleisthenes established his reform to give the same rights to all citizens, old and new, within the new demes and new tribes. Lewis tries to explain a number of unresolved problems with the epigraphic evidence for the Attic demes with the theory that Cleisthenes conceived the reform to strengthen the Alcmeonid clan.
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Lohmann, Hans. 1993. Atene: Forschungen zu Siedlungs- und Wirtschaftsstruktur des klassischen Attika = Atēnē. Cologne: Böhlau.
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Milestone in the study of the Attic demes: Lohmann showed in his surveys of the demos Atene, that only toward the end of the 6th century BCE first traces of settlement can be detected; the population peak of this demos was in the 5th and 4th century BCE and Atene certainly was no demos in Cleisthenian time.
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Manville, Philip Brook. 1997. The origins of citizenship in ancient Athens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Describes how and when the concept of citizenship was developed in Athens. Cleisthenes unified Athens and Attica, town and country, with his system of demes and tribes, advancing the progress of centralization.
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Siewert, Peter. 1982. Die Trittyen Attikas und die Heeresreform des Kleisthenes. Munich: Beck.
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Gives a survey of the demes and trittyes proposing sectors radiating out from the city of Athens combined with roads by which military contingents would better reach the city on mobilization.
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Stanton, Greg R. 1994. The trittyes of Kleisthenes. Chiron 24:161–207.
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In a detailed study, based on his earlier articles, Stanton analyzes the relationships between demes, trittyes, and phylai and seeks to prove how Cleisthenes’s family, the Alcmaeonids, achieved advantages by his reform.
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Traill, John S. 1986. Demos and trittys: Epigraphical and topographical studies in the organization of Attica. Toronto: Athenians, Victoria College.
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Standard edition with overview of all Attic demes; Traill established the current orthodoxy that the number of constitutional demes in Cleisthenes’s system was 139. (Revised and supplemented edition of Traill, John S. 1975. The political organization of Attica: A study of the demes, trittyes, and phylai, and their representation in the Athenian Council. Hesperia Supplements 14: i–169).
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Whitehead, David. 1986. The demes of Attica, 508/7—ca. 250 B.C.: A political and social study. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Describes the demes, deme assemblies, and demarchs in systematic detail; Cleisthenes’s reform and hislegislation for deme administration was pragmatic, not revolutionary.
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The Reform of the Council of Five Hundred

The fifty bouleutai from each tribe were elected by a combination of election and lot as described by Rhodes 1972, Rhodes 1981 (cited under Sources), and Taylor 2007. There is serious disagreement concerning the first establishment of the Council of Five Hundred: If the council was already appointed before the Spartan invasion of King Cleomenes, as believed by Ober and Hedrick 1996 (cited under Collections of Papers), Ober 2005 (cited under Collections of Papers), Ober 2007, he deserves the leading role in the uprising, in the course of which the people got control of affairs and expulsed the Peisistratids (for a different opinion, see Flaig 2004).

Flaig, Egon. 2004. Der verlorene Gründungsmythos der athenischen Demokratie: Wie der Volksaufstand von 507 v. Chr. vergessen wurde. Historische Zeitschrift 279.1: 35–61.
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In 508/7 BCE the Athenians did not carry out a revolutionary and self-conscious rebellion; rather, in later times, they tried to cover up with the myth of the tyrant slayers the fact that in reality the Spartans had eliminated the tyranny.
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Ober, Josiah. 2007. “I besieged that man”: Democracy’s revolutionary start. In Origins of democracy in Ancient Greece. Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub, Josiah Ober, and Robert Wallace, 83–104. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Summary and extension of Ober’s earlier thesis (see also Ober and Hedrick 1996 and Ober 2005; both cited under Collections of Papers) of the people’s decisive role, including the possibility of the council’s leadership.
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Rhodes, Peter John. 1972. The Athenian boule. Oxford: Clarendon.
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Masterly overview of the history of the Athenian Council of Five Hundred. Collects a lot of evidence in favor of a strong position of the council in the first decades after Cleisthenes.
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Taylor, Claire. 2007. From the whole citizen body? The sociology of election and lot in the Athenian democracy. Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 76.2: 323–345.
DOI: 10.2972/hesp.76.2.323Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Important addition to Traill 1986 and Stanton 1994 (both cited under Reform of the Demes) with a focus on the practical procedures of linking demes, trittyes, and phylai. By a comparison of selection procedures, Taylor demonstrates that the lot was a relatively democratic device that distributed offices widely throughout Attica, whereas elections favored demes near the city.
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The Reform of the Ostracism

The much debated ostracism, a procedure in which any citizen could be exiled from Athens for ten years without prosecution and trial, was probably not introduced by Cleisthenes as argued by Heftner 2008 and Dreher 2000 versus Keaney and Raubitschek 1972 and Lehmann 1981.

Dreher, Martin. 2000. Verbannung ohne Vergehen: Der Ostrakismos (das Scherbengericht). In Grosse Prozesse im Antiken Athen. Edited by Leonhard Burckhardt and Jürgen v. Ungern-Sternberg, 66–77. Munich: Beck.
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Summarizes the discussion, especially with a focus on the legal aspects of the procedure and the internal balancing effect.
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Heftner, Herbert. 2008. Überlegungen zum athenischen Ostrakismos. Dike 11:75–109.
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Opts for a later introduction (488/7 BCE) of the ostracism in Athens.
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Keaney, J. J., and A. E. Raubitschek. 1972. A late byzantine account of ostracism. American Journal of Philology 93.1: 87–91.
DOI: 10.2307/292903Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Seminal study with the first discussion of a Byzantine manuscript, which points to an earlier form of ostracism in the period before 500 BCE. This earlier form of ostracism was conducted by the council and not by the people’s assembly.
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Lehmann, G. A. 1981. Der Ostrakismos-Entscheid in Athen: Von Kleisthenes zur Ära des Themistokles. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik ZPE 41:85–99.
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Meticulous analysis of the sources; emphasizes the possibility of an earlier form of ostracism in the years around 500 BCE.
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Siewert, Peter. 2002. Ostrakismos-Testimonien: Die Zeugnisse antiker Autoren, der Inschriften und Ostraka über das athenische Scherbengericht aus vorhellenistischer Zeit (487–322 v. Chr.). Historia Einzelschriften. Stuttgart: Steiner.
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Collection of ostraka of 487–ca. 416 with commentary, testimonia, and apparatus.
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The Archaeology of the Reform

Camp 1986 and Coulson 1994 show that the Athenian Agora was the seat of Athenian government and center of political activity in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. An answer to the question whether buildings on the Agora are connected with the reforms of Cleisthenes mainly depends on the dating of these buildings such as the Bouleuterion, the meeting place of the Boule, and the Royal Stoa and their possible preceding phases. The thesis of the Council of Five Hundred as the central organ of government largely depends on how visible and organized that it was. A closed and representative building would strongly support this. In the years around 500 several buildings were erected on the Agora: the great assembly building for the Council of Five Hundred, which is referred to as the so-called Old bouleuterion, and a smaller office building, the Royal Stoa. Shear 1994 bases the dating of these two buildings mainly on the stratigraphic evidence and the sherds from the building fill. In both buildings nothing indicates a compelling dating after 500 BCE. According to Shear 1994 this burst of construction for public purposes signals a major shift: it is the first occurrence of the demos as a public builder and a specific public architecture in Athens (for a different opinion, see Miller 1995). Today there is a wider debate on whether the reforms of Cleisthenes reflect a wider trend that appears in Greek material culture as Morris 1998 argues or if the special material culture of Athens shows the significance of Cleisthenic reforms for Athenians as argued by Neer 2002.

Camp, John McK. 1986. The Athenian Agora: Excavations in the heart of classical Athens. New Aspects of Antiquity. New York: Thames and Hudson.
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Thorough and expert presentation of the historical and chronological record of Athens; supersedes and expands on J. Travlos (1971. Pictorial dictionary of ancient Athens. New York: Praeger), and R. E. Wycherley (1976. Stones of Athens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press); rich documentation and illustrations of the archaeological evidence.
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Coulson, William D. E. 1994. The archaeology of Athens and Attica under the democracy: Proceedings of an International Conference Celebrating 2500 Years since the Birth of Democracy in Greece, held at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, December 4–6, 1992. Edited by W. D. E. Coulson. Oxbow monograph 37. Oxford: Oxbow.
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The papers of this volume are mainly concerned with structures, sculpture, cult and festival, with a fresh look at art and architecture in Athens; based on new results of recent Greek and American excavations. Also see Collections of Papers.
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Miller, Stephen G. 1995. Old Metroon and Old Bouleuterion in the Classical Agora of Athens. In Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis. Edited by Mogens Herman Hansen and Kurt A. Raaflaub, 133–156. Stuttgart: Steiner.
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Supposes that the first meeting place of the Council of Five Hundred was an open-air meeting place and the first closed building was erected much later in the 5th century BCE.
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Morris, Ian. 1998. Beyond democracy and empire: Athenian art in context. In Democracy, empire, and the arts in fifth-century Athens. Edited by Deborah D. Boedeker and Kurt A. Raaflaub, 59–86. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Connected cycles of display and restraint in the use of material culture can be seen in classical Athens, Eretria, Corinth, Argos, and Macedonia: in each region, a period of restraint in housing and burial in the 5th century BCE was followed by a sharp increase in display in the 4th century BCE.
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Neer, Richard T. 2002. Style and politics in Athenian vase-painting: The craft of democracy, ca. 530–460 B.C.E. Edited by T. Neer Richard. Cambridge Studies in Classical Art and Iconography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Discusses in a major contribution to classical archaeology and art history interactions between vase-painting and social or political discourses at Athens in the late 6th and the early 5th century BCE, suggesting that the appearance of potter portraits is related to the social upheavals attending the Cleisthenic reforms at Athens.
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Shear, T. Leslie, Jr. 1994. Ισονόμους τ’ Ἀθήνης ἐποιησάτην. In The Archaeology of Athens and Attica under the democracy: Proceedings of an International Conference celebrating 2500 years since the birth of democracy in Greece, held at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, December 4–6, 1992. Edited by William D. E. Coulson, 225–248. Oxford: Oxbow.
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It was only shortly after the reforms of Cleisthenes around 500 BCE that the first Bouleuterion and the Royal Stoa were built on the Agora as public buildings and visualization of a new kind of government.
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An Emerging Democratic Ideology

There has been a long-standing discussion on the motives of Cleisthenes and the extent to which his reforms reflect an emerging democratic ideology: Anderson 2003, Lévêque and Vidal-Naquet 1996, and Ober 1989 see Cleisthenes as a democratic reformer creating a new world-order; Davies 2003, Lewis 1963 (cited under Reform of the Demes), and Ruschenbusch 1979 argue that Cleisthenes’s reforms had either not very altruistic motives or were practical solutions for practical problems.

Anderson, Greg. 2003. The Athenian experiment: Building an imagined political community in ancient Attica: 508–490 B.C. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
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Anderson rejects the standard view that the involvement of non-elite Athenians in politics and warfare and the integration of Athens and its region were gradual, long-term processes involving reform-oriented leaders such as Solon and Peisistratos. Anderson—contra Ober—privileges Cleisthenes as the creator of the institutions and of the military power and full democracy of classical Athens.
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Davies, John Kenyon. 2003. Democracy without theory. In Herodotus and his world. Edited by Peter Derow and Ruth Parker, 319–335. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253746.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Political theory is not necessary to explain the development of Greek democracy: pragmatics, crisis management, and a set of plain ideas about justice and equality are more than sufficient.
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Lévêque, Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. 1996. Cleisthenes the Athenian: An essay on the representation of space and time in Greek political thought from the end of the sixth century BC to the death of Plato. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities.
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Originally published in French 1964. The reforms of Cleisthenes reflect primarily a profound transformation of the polis in space, time, and number, making a clear break with the past in the redivision of the people, the public areas, and the reshaping of the calendar; the new organization of political space privileged the center with the boule, precisely because this center in Athens represented the political form of current theories of proportion.
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Ober, Josiah. 1989. Mass and elite in democratic Athens: Rhetoric, ideology, and the power of the people. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Since 1989—the first seminal publication of Ober concerning the issue of political sociology in Athens—Ober is devoted to the topic of people’s attitudes concerning political order. See also Ober and Hedrick 1996 (cited under Collections of Papers), Ober 2005 (cited under Collections of Papers), and Ober 2007 (cited under Reform of the Council of Five Hundred).
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Ruschenbusch, Eberhard. 1979. Athenische Innenpolitik im 5. Jahrhundert v. Chr.: Ideologie oder Pragmatismus. Bamberg, Germany: aku-Fotodruck.
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Argues that the system of Athenian democratic institutions was not the product of ideological theory but of successive practical needs, most of them arising from the demands of external policy.
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Isonomia: The New Political Order

In later times, the events that led to the overthrow of tyranny and political reform in Athens, were partially presented differently: Thucydides Book 6, chapters 53–59 in an excursus on the tyrant slayers Harmodius and Aristogeiton; he criticized his fellow citizens, accusing them of a lack of knowledge of their own past in declaring Harmodius and Aristogeiton as the liberators of Athens from tyranny. The tradition that Thucydides refers to is on the one hand represented by a drinking song from around 500 BCE celebrating the two tyrant slayers Harmodios and Aristogeiton as the bringers of isonomia, discussed in Rausch 1999 and Triebel-Schubert 1984, and on the other hand by the high veneration that descendants of the two still enjoyed in 5th-century Athens. Vernant 1984 indicates that isonomia is used later by Herodotus (Book 3, chapters 80–82) as synonymous with democracy and emerged in the 6th century BCE as a concept of political order. The term is probably a precursor concept, from which later democracy evolved (Meier 1980, Raaflaub 2004, Raaflaub, et al. 2007, and Vlastos 1953 differ from Paul Cartledge 2007, “Democracy, Origins Of: Contribution to a Debate,” pp. 155–169, in Raaflaub, et al. 2007, cited under General Overviews). Anderson 2003, Ober 1989 (both cited under An Emerging Democratic Ideology), and Walter and Stahl 2009 offer a completely different opinion, emphasizing the role of the people in 508/7 BCE; these authors see democracy already coming into being in Cleisthenes’s time, arising from a new and dominant self-consciousness of non-elite Athenians. Hansen and Nielsen 2004 and Robinson 2011 contextualize isonomia in the general development of the Greek poleis.

Hansen, Mogens Herman, and Thomas Heine Nielsen. 2004. An inventory of archaic and classical poleis. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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This is the main result of the work of the Copenhagen Polis Centre and comprises 1,035 entries in the inventory. The location of the 1,029 poleis that could be located either exactly or approximately is assigned in cooperation with the Barrington Atlas.
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Meier, Christian. 1980. Die Entstehung des Politischen bei den Griechen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
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Discusses the development of Athenian democracy in the 5th century BCE and the special character of Greek political thought as well as the practice of democracy. The political empowerment of the people features on a deeper level; isonomia represents an artificial political order that had to be created in opposition to the social one. The English version (1990. The Greek Discovery of Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press), omits the two more narrowly historiographical chapters “Prozess und Ereignis in der griechischen Historiographie des 5. Jahrhunderts v. Chr.” and “Die Entstehung der Historie.” Also see General Overviews.
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Raaflaub, Kurt A.. 2004. The discovery of freedom in Ancient Greece. Translated by Renate Franciscono. 1st English ed., rev. and updated from the German ed. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Authoritative, conceptual analysis of the development of the Greek concept of eleutheria; in Raaflaub’s opinion, important ideas of Athenian democracy as absolute freedom, absolute sovereignty and autarkeia (a city as a collective in completely self-sufficient linkage of freedom and rule over others) have only been developing since 461 BCE and have nothing to do with the Cleisthenic reforms, although this institutional development went several steps further than the Solonian and was characterized by the basic idea of political equality.
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Raaflaub, Kurt A., Josiah Ober, and Robert W. Wallace, eds. 2007. Origins of democracy in ancient Greece. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520245624.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Summary of a long-standing discussion: The volume collects the controversial positions of prominent scholars (formulated partly new or in extended version) on the question if democracy was invented or did evolve gradually. Includes chapters by Paul Cartledge and Cynthia Farrar. Also see General Overviews and Collections of Papers.
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Rausch, Mario. 1999. Isonomia in Athen: Veränderungen des öffentlichen Lebens vom Sturz der Tyrannis bis zur zweiten Perserabwehr. Europäische Hochschulschriften Reihe 3, 821. Frankfurt: Lang.
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Presents the archaeological, epigraphic, and literary evidence of all incidents of isonomia in Athens; focuses on the institutional development and supposes an aristocratization (“Aristokratisierung”) of the Athenian demos.
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Robinson, Eric W. 2011. Democracy beyond Athens: Popular government in the Greek classical age. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511977527Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Robinson’s analysis of democracies in the Classical period outside Athens is based on an inventory of fifty-four democratically governed city-states. Robinson’s main concern is to challenge the belief that ancient Greek democracy was Athenian democracy and that democracies in other poleis were copies of the Athenian constitution. His study is incomplete in comparison with Hansen and Nielsen 2004.
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Triebel-Schubert, Charlotte 1984. Der Begriff der Isonomie bei Alkmaion. Klio 66:40–50.
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Around 500 BCE different concepts of isonomia were in circulation. The pre-Socratic philosopher Alcmaeon (Diels/Kranz 24 B 4) used a concept of isonomia, which is fundamentally different from the underlying idea of mixing different parts of a people in one constitutional structure such as developed by Cleisthenes.
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Vernant, Jean Pierre. 1984. The origins of Greek thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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Originally published in French in 1962: Authoritative study, sees the origins of Cleisthenes’s reform in the symmetric, earth-centered cosmological model of the pre-Socratic philosophers.
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Vlastos, Gregory. 1953. Isonomia. American Journal of Philology 74.4: 337–366.
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Meticulous study of the term isonomia: Isonomia expresses an idea, indeed a whole set of ideas, by which the partisans of democracy justified the rule of the people.
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Walter, Uwe, and Michael Stahl. 2009. Athens. In A Companion to Archaic Greece. Edited by Kurt Raaflaub and Hans Van Wees, 138–161. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
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Another analysis of the Cleisthenic reforms as a revolutionary step in the development of the Athenian citizen-state (see pp. 152–161).
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Cultural and Political Context of the Reform

The program and function of Athenian festivals stands in close connection with the understanding of the government being an important aspect of Athen’s political identity and civic ideology as emphasized by Osborne 2010. Connor 1996 and Goldhill 1987 see the cults and festivals of the democracy as promoting group cohesion through the temporary contestation of rules and structures and their temporality coining a civic discourse. Neils 1994 shows how the main festival of the Athenians, the Panathenaea, has changed repeatedly over the time of the Athenian polis. The core of the festival is a ceremonial procession of citizens from the western entrance of the city, the Dipylon gate, across the Agora up to the Acropolis. With Cleisthenes’s reform, new athletic and artistic individual competitions were added in which the Attic tribes competed against each other: the Pyrrhike, the Euandria, and the torch race. Awards were given both to individual victors and the entire tribe. Prices and victories were publicly recorded and visualized the new organization; see Osborne 2010. Connor 1990 and Goldhill 1987 discuss another, equally significant public celebration of all Athenians, the Great Dionysia, which goes back directly to the reform of Cleisthenes. Since 502/1 BCE, the Great Dionysia were publicly celebrated including dramatic competitions in four categories (comedy, tragedy, satire, and dithyramb). In particular Attic tragedy therefore appears as an expression of political order, specifically that of the Athenian democracy of the 5th century BCE. For the changes in political communication, see Ruzé 1997.

Connor, W. R. 1990. City Dionysia and Athenian democracy. In Aspects of Athenian democracy. Edited by W. R. Connor, M. H. Hansen, K. A. Raaflaub, and B. S. Strauss, 7–32. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.
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Connor suggested that the festival of the Great Dionysia was instituted after the fall of the tyranny as a festival of freedom.
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Connor, W. R. 1996. Festival and democracy. In “Démocratie Athénienne et culture”: Colloque internationale organisé par l’académie d’Athènes en coopération avec L’UNESCO (23, 24 et 25 Novembre 1992). Edited by Francisco R. Adrados and Michel B. Sakellariou, 79–89. Athens, Greece: Akadimia Athinon.
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Cleisthenes deliberately used the topsyturvydom of Dionysiac worship to challenge the norms of aristocratic society.
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Goldhill, Simon D. 1987. The Great Dionysia and civic ideology. Journal of Hellenic Studies 107:58–76.
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Emphasizes the agonistic nature of Greek tragedy and its association with social and political phenomena; Goldhill shows that also the transgressive force of tragedy and comedy do not run counter to the civic ideology but that in the interplay of norm and transgression enacted in the festival, which both lauds the polis and depicts the stresses and tensions of a polis society in conflict, the city-ideology is stabilized.
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Neils, Jenifer. 1994. The Panathenaia and Cleisthenic ideology. In The Archaeology of Athens and Attica under the democracy: Proceedings of an International Conference celebrating 2500 years since the birth of democracy in Greece, held at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, December 4–6, 1992. Edited by William D. E. Coulson, 151–160. Oxford: Oxbow.
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Neils considers the tribal contests at the Panathenaea with references especially to the vase images and sees in them a deliberately recurring remainder of Cleisthenes’s reforms.
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Osborne, Robin. 2010. Competitive festivals and the polis: A context for dramatic festivals at Athens. In Athens and Athenian democracy. Edited by Robin Osborne, 325–340. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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The context of competitive festivals shows that in Athens this kind of competitiveness was controlled in the framework of the civic order.
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Ruzé, Françoise. 1997. Délibération et pouvoir dans la cité grecque: De Nestor à Socrate. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne.
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The process of deliberation began with the reform of Cleisthenes, in particular with the Council of Five Hundred, whose representative function stands in contrast to the assembly.