Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

scene. Athens had become a city in which any citizen, no matter how poor or uneducated, was guaranteed freedom of public speech;47 in which policy was no longer debated in the closed and gilded salons of the aristocracy, but openly, in the Assembly, before “carpenter, blacksmith or cobbler, merchant or ship-owner, rich or poor, aristocrat or low-born alike”;48 in which no measure could be adopted, no law passed, save by the votes of all the Athenian people. It was a great and noble experiment, a state in which, for the first time, a citizen could feel himself both engaged and in control. Nothing in Athens, or indeed Greece, would ever quite be the same again. And that, for Cleisthenes and all who supported him, was absolutely the point. The sponsors of the Athenian revolution were no giddy visionaries moved by shimmering notions of brotherhood with the poor, but rather hard-nosed pragmatists whose goal, quite simply, was to profit as Athenian noblemen by making their city strong. To this ambition, and to the whole immense project that followed from it, they brought a desperate energy. Time, as they well knew, was hardly on their side. It was not only that Cleomenes, “who felt that the Athenians had shown him disrespect in word and deed,”49 was set on revenge; Cleisthenes also feared, with both Hippias and Isagoras plotting their returns, that the city might implode at any moment into rival factions. Dynastic feuding, having brought Athens to the point of ruin, was simply t...