Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

Cleisthenes, though he had stooped to many low tricks in his time, had never sunk quite as low as that. For all his mastery of scam and spin, he was much more than the grasping opportunist of his enemies’ propaganda. Resolute in his determination not to see Athens sunk to the status of a Spartan client state, he could also recognize that Isagoras and his allies were fighting a war that had already had its day. Few Athenians might have recognized it, but the character of their city had changed forever. Authority, under the tyrants, had become a thing of shadow, melted from the grip of the elite who had once hugged it so tightly to themselves. Now that the tyranny itself was gone, it was difficult to say where precisely power resided. With those few families, the Alcmaeonids themselves, perhaps, or the Philaids, who still had a personal base? Perhaps, but Cleisthenes’ own experiences since his return to Athens had demonstrated that even the very grandest Eupatrids, weakened by exile or by the humiliations of collaboration, had been perilously leeched of their prestige. Menaced by Isagoras, he chose to turn for support not, as was traditional for one of his background, to other factions among the elite, to those of wealth and breeding, but to a wholly original source. Addressing an assembly of the citizens, Cleisthenes proposed what was in effect a revolution.43 If the people, as Hippias, as Pisistratus, as even Solon had always claimed, were truly sovereign, very well then—l...