We covered briefly the accomplishments of Pisistratus, the tyrant of Athens in the mid sixth century. In fact he was such a good ruler, that Aristotle, writing a couple of centuries later, had to devise a special category for him, and Aristotle's accounts tyranny is bad, but for Pisistratus as I say, he had to make an exception because Pisistratus was acknowledged as having been such a ruler, such an accomplished ruler, that he is, according to Aristotle, half bad. He's bad by definition, because he's a tyrant, you can't break that down too bad, too much. But, he was so good, that he has this sort of role aside from the normal run of tyrants. But tyranny, as we've also seen, goes by descent, and in this case it's sort of literal, that means going down, because after his death in 528-7 Peisistratus' rule passed to his sons, Hippias and Hipparchus. They seemed to have ruled pretty peacefully, and fairly well for over a decade. We are told that they supported the arts, that they brought poets and singers to Athens. There was even some notion for sometime, that it was during their time, that the texts of Homer, were, took on their canonical forms. There's what's called the pisistrati and recension, you don't need to remember that. But for now, all we need to know is that at least initially, this tandem rule between the brothers seems to have succeeded, and then, things go bad. The legend is that two Athenian citizens, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, kill Hipparchus in order to free Athens. There survives an old drinking song, which goes, let me hide my sword in a bow of mrytle as did Harmodius and Aristogeiton when they killed the tyrant and set Athens free. Thucydides the historian, we'll see him again over and over, is, it's almost seems offended by this story. He says no, this wasn't really about politics, it was about a personal insult. And that is, that Hyparkus nominally the younger brother of the two, made an advance on a beautiful young man named Harmodius. Harmodius who was partnered with Aristogeiton, rejected the tyrants advances, and so, Hyparkus then insulted the family, by forbidding, this is a little hard to follow but, he forbad Harmodius' sister from participating in the panathenaic procession. What's so bad about that? Well what's so bad about [laugh] it, is that the young girls who were to participate were supposed to be virgins, and so by excluding her from this celebration, the implication was that she was unchaste. We come then to the panathenea, the great festival that had been founded, as we said, by Pysistoris the Senior. In 514 BCE, Harmodius and Aristogeiton decide to get revenge. And the story gets murky, there are a number of different variants. You can ch, check them out on our website. The one thing that we can say, pretty much for certain, is that it was at that festival that they killed Hipparchus. He was either inside the city getting ready to send off the procession, or outside getting ready to receive it, there's a variety of details, we don't need to go into that. But what happens is, that this becomes famous as the tyrannicide. This is a Roman marble copy of an Athenian bronze original, that shows Harmodius and Aristogeiton, this is in a Naples museum now, a massive statue. But what happens next is not the end of the tyranny, not immediately. Harmodius and Aristogeiton are killed, as are co-conspirators, if there were any, again, the, the sources differ. But one of the things that is clear is that, after this, Hippias' rule became much harsher. Began to travel around with a bodyguard, he was not surprisingly paranoid, suspicious of plots against him. And then, in 511, he was expelled. The Spartan king, Kleomenes, came out and helped an Athenian politician named Isagoras and, Hippias had taken refuge on the Acropolis, that's always where you go. But Kleomenes, by sheer good fortune, at least for himself, managed to capture some members of Hippias' family. And they arranged a negotiation, Hippias left Athens with his family, and that was the end of the Pisistratus tyranny. What follows next has been the subject of enormous controversy. The version that I'm going to talk about with you, The Athenian revolution. I want to gove credit here credit is due. This was formulated by an American scholar Josiah Ober, in an article in a book of the same name. Because what we're dealing with here is a real problem of interpretation. We have seen big men in various manifestations, the big men who ran the regional factions by Pisistratus big men etc., then the next big man, if we want to think of him that way to come up is one Clytoneus. He's a member of the Alcmaeonid clan, they're back. And it had been thought that Clytoneus was sort of the leader of a popular revolt, because what happened next was that Kleomenes the Spartan king, came back, and with his political, Athenian political ally Isagoras, attempted to take over the state. .And their first step was to dissolve the council, the Boule, In Ober's reconstruction which I think is the most faithful to our sources, we hear that the Boule resists. They don't want to be dissolved. Then as we've seen over and over ever since the seventh century in Kyleon, Kleomenes and Isogoras blocade, or blocade themselves, occupy the Acropolis, with a Spartan garrison. And now here, the old, older versions of the story would have you say that Clytoneus rallied the people, there's one big problem with this, which is that Clytoneus was in exile this time, he wasn't in Athens. Instead, what we have is the sources telling us that the rest of the Athenians unite, or as Aristotle says, the crowd gathered itself together. They besiege the Spartan occupiers on the Acropolis. And finally, on the third day of the siege Kleomenes surrenders, it's not worth a fight, and the Spartans withdraw under truce and Clytoneus is called back to the city. What Ober's version, where Ober's theory, his reconstruction does I think, as I said, is to stay closer to the original sources that we have. But it posits something quite extraordinary, which is a leaderless, popular, revolution. This is no longer a group of people following a leader, instead we have the crowd gathering itself together. And what's striking is that in our recent history, we have seen something similar, and I'm thinking of the Arab Spring. The overthrow of various rulers in the Middle East, seems to have occurred in one place after another, as the result of a spontaneous popular uprising. I think this, a couple of century, a couple of millenia later, provides some confirmation for Ober's theory. And there's another problem here as well, another question that you just want to think over. I'm not going to propose an answer, which is okay, we've gotten rid of the tyrants. We've gotten rid of the Spartans, and put Isagoras off to the side. And we have brought back Clytoneus whose reforms it is thought were, as we will see, the basis for the developed Athenian democracy. Was this in fact a tidal change in the course of Athenian history? I would say yes. And as we go on in our next lecture to examine Clytoneus' reforms, perhaps you'll agree.
