Which aristocrat seized power in athens

Such tyrannies were a common feature of Greek political life as states made the transition from an aristocracy to either a democracy or an oligarchy. Often the tyrant arose as the champion of the common people against the aristocracy.

Peisistratos, head of one of the large aristocratic families, seized power by force during a period of factional strife. Though many Athenians fled or were forced into exile Herodotus 1. That Peisistratid rule was surprisingly open is borne out by a fragment of a list of archons which shows that in B. His reign, like that of so many tyrants, was characterized by large public works projects, the first in Athens for centuries.

In addition, an extensive system of aqueducts and fountainhouses brought a reliable supply of good clean water into the city.

The impact of this fine new water system is reflected in the fountainhouse scenes painted on dozens of black-figure hydrias water jars and other pots in the late 6th century. Matters changed with the death of Peisistratos when his two sons Hippias and Hipparchos took over in B.

Aristotle describes the characters of the two brothers:. About ten years later, in or BCE , the Athenians enlisted a certain Draco to make new laws for them. Poor citizens, in years of poor harvests, had to mortgage portions of their land to wealthier citizens in exchange for food and seed to plant.

Having lost the use of a portion of their land, they were even more vulnerable to subsequent hardships see Aristot. Eventually, many of these Athenians lost the use of their land altogether, and became tenant-farmers, virtually or perhaps actually slaves to the wealthy.

The resulting crisis threatened both the stability and prosperity of Athens. In , however, the Athenians selected Solon to revise their laws. Read about the evidence Andocides Andoc. Solon took steps to alleviate the crisis of debt that the poor suffered, and to make the constitution of Athens somewhat more equitable.

He gave every Athenian the right to appeal to a jury, thus taking ultimate authority for interpreting the law out of the hands of the Nine Archons and putting it in the hands of a more democratic body, since any citizen could serve on a jury Aristot.

Otherwise, he divided the population into four classes, based on wealth, and limited the office of Archon to members of the top three classes Aristot.

Formerly, the Council of the Areopagus , which consisted of former Archons , chose the Nine Archons each year—a self-perpetuating system that ensured that the office of Archon was held only by aristocrats. So, by some unknown process, an individual named Draco was chosen as a lawgiver, to put crimes and punishment into a body of laws that everyone had to obey. This he did during the 39 th Olympiad between BC. For the first time the Greeks had the rule of law to guide them rather than individual discretion or preference.

This had the effect of making the state and not the family responsible for enforcing the law and the intention was that the law would apply equally to all men, rich or poor. For the first time a distinction was made between someone killed deliberately and someone killed accidentally.

Previously there had been no distinction made and the penalty was the same. Even things could be punished. There is a story told about a statue falling on top of someone and killing him. The statue was flogged and cast into the sea as punishment. Draco's laws may have been fair but they were severe. Death was the punishment for offences that we might consider minor.

Generations later a Greek orator lamented that Draco's laws were written not in ink but in blood. The laws also did not address a major problem at the time- people were being put into prison or forced into slavery because of debt. Soon it became evident that the laws needed to be reviewed and revised.

Ephialtes and Pericles presided over a radicalisation of power that shifted the balance decisively to the poorest sections of society. Cleisthenes was the son of an Athenian, but the grandson and namesake of a foreign Greek tyrant, the ruler of Sicyon in the Peloponnese. For a time he was also the brother-in-law of the Athenian tyrant, Peisistratus, who seized power three times before finally establishing a stable and apparently benevolent dictatorship.

That victory in turn encouraged the poorest Athenians to demand a greater say in the running of their city, and in the late s Ephialtes and Pericles presided over a radicalisation of power that shifted the balance decisively to the poorest sections of society. This was the democratic Athens that won and lost an empire, that built the Parthenon, that gave a stage to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, and that laid the foundations of western rational and critical thought.

The democratic system was not, of course, without internal critics, and when Athens had been weakened by the catastrophic Peloponnesian War these critics got their chance to translate word into deed. In and again in Athenian oligarchs led counter-revolutions that replaced democracy with extreme oligarchy. In the oligarchs were supported by Athens's old enemy, Sparta - but even so the Athenian oligarchs found it impossible to maintain themselves in power, and after just a year democracy was restored.

A general amnesty was declared the first in recorded history and - with some notorious 'blips' such as the trial of Socrates - the restored Athenian democracy flourished stably and effectively for another 80 years.

Finally, in , the kingdom of Macedon which had risen under Philip and his son Alexander the Great to become the suzerain of all Aegean Greece terminated one of the most successful experiments ever in citizen self-government.

Democracy continued elsewhere in the Greek world to a limited extent - until the Romans extinguished it for good. The architects of the first democracies of the modern era, post-revolutionary France and the United States, claimed a line of descent from classical Greek demokratia - 'government of the people by the people for the people', as Abraham Lincoln put it. But at this point it is crucial that we keep in mind the differences between our and the Greeks' systems of democracy - three key differences in particular: of scale, of participation and of eligibility.

Athenian democracy was direct and in-your-face First, scale. There were no proper population censuses in ancient Athens, but the most educated modern guess puts the total population of fifth-century Athens, including its home territory of Attica, at around , - men, women and children, free and unfree, enfranchised and disenfranchised. Of those , some 30, on average were fully paid-up citizens - the adult males of Athenian birth and full status.

Of those 30, perhaps 5, might regularly attend one or more meetings of the popular Assembly, of which there were at least 40 a year in Aristotle's day. The second key difference is the level of participation.