Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

Yet how to neutralize them? Cleisthenes’ solution was both brilliantly simple and quite ferociously ambitious: to suppress a citizen’s identification with family, neighborhood and local clan chief altogether. Since these were instincts that had long come naturally to almost everyone in Attica, the plan to scotch them required peculiarly ingenious and detailed measures. Punctiliously, Cleisthenes sliced up the countryside, with its ancient tapestry of towns, estates and villages, into almost 150 separate districts. It was from these, the “demes,” and no longer from their families, that the citizens of the new democracy would henceforward be obliged to take their second names. Their civic identity too—for a young man, when he came of age, might become a citizen of Athens under Cleisthenes’ reforms only by being enrolled within a deme. This was to apply to the haughtiest Eupatrid and the humblest plowman in the field alike: both, as fellow demesmen, would share the same second name. Not all Eupatrids were necessarily thrilled by this innovation, of course. Some of them, particularly those so grand that they had an estate or village, and thereby a deme, named after them, made their disgruntlement with the new order all too clear. The Boutads, for instance, fed up with having to share their distinguished nomenclature with riffraff, pointedly gave themselves a new name: the Authentic Boutads.50 Still, they had to be careful. Sniff too pointedly at one’s fellow demesmen, and even...