Cleisthenes

Not 501 BCE

The year 501 BCE attached to this entry is not the accepted date. Ancient tradition places Cleisthenes' reform program in the Athenian archon-year 508/507 BCE, dated by the archonship of his rival Isagoras.

Even that is a program rather than a moment. One scholarly reconstruction dates the tribal implementation to 507/506, and Oxford describes reforms continuing in subsequent years; the sources establish no modern-style enactment day.

Cleomenes intervenes, and Athens resists

Cleisthenes, an Alcmaeonid aristocrat, was losing a factional contest to Isagoras and sought support from the wider citizen body. Isagoras called in the Spartan king Cleomenes I, who entered Athens with a small force, expelled 700 households in Aristotle's account, and tried to replace the council with Isagoras and 300 supporters.

The council and the populace resisted. After a two-day siege of the Acropolis the Spartan force departed under truce; Herodotus says the captured opponents who were not Spartan were imprisoned and put to death. Cleisthenes and the expelled families were recalled.

Ten tribes, thirty thirds, five hundred councillors

Cleisthenes replaced the four existing civic tribes with ten, redistributing the citizen body through demes and thirty regional thirds drawn from the city, the coast and the interior of Attica — so each tribe was a cross-section of the country rather than a neighbourhood bloc. The council grew from 400 members to 500, fifty from each new tribe.

The deme became an official basis of civic identification. Aristotle says Athenians were officially identified by deme so that newly enrolled citizens would not be exposed through their fathers' names.

The older kinship bodies were not erased: Aristotle says clans, phratries and inherited priesthoods continued underneath the new civic structure, and he dates the first use of ostracism to 487 BCE.