Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/181

 EFFECT OF THE KLEISTHENEAN REVOLUTION. 103 when) it was introduced after the expulsion of the Gelonian dynasty, Diodorus affirms that it was so unjustly and profusely ap- plied, as to deter persons of wealth and station from taking any part in public affairs ; for which reason it was speedily discontinued. We have no particulars to enable us to appreciate this general statement. But we cannot safely infer that because the ostracism worked on the whole well at Athens, it must necessarily have worked well in other states, the more so, as we do not know whether it was surrounded with the same precautionary formalities, nor whether it even required the same large minimum of votes to make it effective. This latter guarantee, so valuable in regard to an institution essentially easy to abuse, is not noticed by Diodo- rus in his brief account of the Petalism, so the process was denominated at Syracuse. 1 Such was the first Athenian democracy, engendered as well by the reaction against Hippias and his dynasty as by the mem- orable partnership, whether spontaneous or compulsory, between Kleisthenes and the unfranchised multitude. It is to be distin- guished, both from the mitigated oligarchy established by Solon before, and from the full-grown and symmetrical democracy which prevailed afterwards from the beginning of the Peloponnesian war towards the close of the career of Perikles. It was, indeed, a striking revolution, impressed upon the citizen not less by the sentiments to which it appealed than by the visible change which it made in political and social life. He saw himself marshalled in the ranks of hoplites, alongside of new companions in arms, he was enrolled in a new register, and his property in a new schedule, in his deme and by his demarch, an officer before unknown, he found the year distributed afresh, for all legal purposes, into ten parts bearing the name of prytanies, each marked by a solemn and free-spoken ekklesia, at which he had a right to be present, that ekklesia was convoked and presided by senators called prytanes, members of a senate novel both as to number and distribution, his political duties were now per- formed as member of a tribe, designated by a name not before 1 Diodor. xi, 55-87. This author describes very imperfectly the Atheniaa ostracism, transferring to it apparently the circumstances of the Syracnsan Petalism.