Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/158

 140 HISTORY OF GREECE. ruled, though it did not supplant, the local and cantonal special ties. It is not too much to say that these patriotic and ennobling impulses were a new product in the Athenian mind, to which nothing analogous occurs even in the time of Solon. They were kindled in part doubtless by the strong reaction against the Pei sistratids, but still more by the fact that the opposing leader, Kleisthenes, turned that transitory feeling to the best possible account, and gave to it a vigorous perpetuity, as well as a well- defined positive object, by the popular elements conspicuous in his constitution. His name makes less figure in history than we should expect, because he passed for the mere renovator of So- lon's scheme of government after it had been overthrown by Peisistratus. Probably he himself professed this object, since it would facilitate the success of his propositions : and if we con- fine ourselves to the letter of the case, the fact is in a great measure true, since the annual senate and the ekklesia are both Solonian, but both of them under his reform were clothed in totally new circumstances, and swelled into gigantic proportions. How vigorous was the burst of Athenian enthusiasm, altering instantaneously the position of Athens among the powers of Greece, we shall hear presently from the lips of Herodotus, and shall find still more unequivocally marked in the facts of his history. But it was not only the people formally installed in their ekklesia, who received from Kleisthenes the real attributes oi sovereignty, it was by him also that the people were first called into direct action as dikasts, or jurors. I have already re- marked, that this custom may be said, in a certain limited sense, to have begun in the time of Solon, since that lawgiver invested the popular assembly with the power of pronouncing the judg- ment of accountability upon the archons after their year of office. Here, again, the building, afterwards so spacious and stalely, was erected on a Solonian foundation, though it was not itself Solo- nian. That the popular dikasteries, in the elaborate form in which they existed from Perikles downward, were introduced all at once by Kleisthenes, it is impossible to believe ; yet the steps by which they were gradually wrought out are not distinctly dis- coverable. It would rather seem, that at first only the aggregate body of citizens above thirty years of age exercised judici?J