Cleisthenes

Cleomenes supports, the Spartan king, the man whose house he stays in and allegedly, according to the rumor, with whose wife he has an affair at the same time as part of this hospitality.

He loses sway in Athens to Cleisthenes and the Democrats, this other group that want a much more radical reform.

And it's then when the Spartans invade.

It's then when they don't get defeated directly by the Athenians.

It's an ongoing kind of struggle, and if we see, if we see Athens as the kind of paradigm of all of this, the interesting thing is that they didn't just wake up one day and say, "Look, you know, we're gonna be democratic now." It's, it's a consistent attempt to try and find responses to problems that showed up over and over and over again, right? These problems are things like huge wealth disparity, a few people dominating things, the question of who gets to be in charge of the law courts, all the basic stuff.

And then this really reduces increasingly into this system that is radically egalitarian by the time we get someone like Cleisthenes, so in, you know, 509, 508 BC.

But even ironically, again, even in the most radically democratic period in classical Athens, that's still the time where you see these individuals really come to the fore.

Mm-hmm.

So the irony is that when Athens is constitutionally at its most democratic, it's also the time that we see these kind of, quote-unquote, "great statesmen," you know, people like Alcibiades, Pericles, you know, even Cleisthenes, Nicies, and others come to the fore.

Plato was really, really worried about this-

Mm

Athens, which had been great before, now grew even greater when her tyrants had been removed.

The two principal holders of powers were Cleisthenes, an Alcmaeonid, who was reputed to have bribed the Pythian priestess, and Isagoras, son of Tisandrus, a man of a notable house, but his lineage I cannot say.

His kinfolk, at any rate, sacrificed to Zeus of Caria.

These men with their factions fell to contending for power.

Cleisthenes was getting the worst of it in this dispute, and took the commons into his party.

Presently he divided the Athenians into ten tribes instead of four as formerly.

He called none after the names of the sons of Ion, Galeon, Aegicoris, Argades, and Hoplis, but invented for them names taken from other heroes, all native to the country except Aeus.

Him he added despite the fact that he was a stranger because he was a neighbor and an ally.

And the polis, therefore, was built by breaking up kinship structures, family structures, at least insofar as these kinship and family structures had public significance.

And the main character here is Cleisthenes, um, one of the, uh, main Greek lawgivers in the Athenian era, who broke up the old tribes, the philia, and turned them into demes, the beginning of our words rule of the demes or democracy.

The old goddess of the family in Greece was Hestia.

And, uh, at least in one story, uh, told by Robert Graves, um, Hestia gives up her seat at the Gr- at the Gr- in the Greek gods to Dionysus with the rise of the Homeric gods.

That's the same thing.

Historical accounts note that the lawmaker Cleisthenes even mandated organized citizens to applause, uh, to, to applause the welcoming of le- of leaders.

Nero famously established formal schools for s- professional applauders.

That's what I need to be.