The old elite families, in other words, were using their client relations with the
poorer citizens to get their political enemies out of the way for awhile.
One other element of ostrocism that we should mention is that it put an end to
the wholesale expulsion of clans. This was just one person, presumable with
his immediate family who had to leave, so you didn't have massive groups having to
go find their way out of the city. There's another change that occurs as
well, which is in 487. The procedure for selecting the archons
changes. Up to this time they had been elected.
From now on they are selected by lot out of a group of candidates put together by
the Boule, by that council of 500. Selection by lot, term in office of just
one year after which they passed into the old council of the area up against means
that then archonship, although honorific, becomes less and less of a real political
factor, and now we can see the political weight moving toward the general ship,
that board of ten generals elected and potentially re-elected over and over again
out of the tribes. It's at this point as well, that we'll
start to think about one of the great figures of Athenian history at this time,
and that is Themistocles. He is from an old family but not really
elite. There are allegations that his mother was
not even Athenian or perhaps even worse, a slave.
Probably not true, just political slander. But Themistocles is the proverbial tricky
man, he's the trickster of Athenian politics.
He's a sort of Odyssian figure in a Athenian political life.
He'd served as an Archon in the late 490s, and had started To fortify, that is to
build a wall around the Athenian port city, or the port community down at
Piraeus. He also was elected strategus, that is
general, in 490, 89 and as I said, in all likelihood almost certainly fought at
Marathon. We next hear about him, though, in
connection with an Athenian, striking treasure.
In the area of Laurion, down to the southeast here, the Athenians discovered a
huge load of silver. And on this map, a French map, you can see
all those squares represent mine sites, so they're dozens of them.
This gave the Athenians, the Athenian community, an enormous new source of
wealth. Pause for a moment to remember those who
dug it out, because mining then, as now, was dirty and dangerous.
Then, however, it was reserved for slaves or captives in war.
And we have quite remarkably represented on a vase painting, miners.
You can see one of them hacking away at a rock face, another collecting what has
been chopped off, and then another handing a basket up to somebody who will take it
out and examine it for whatever treasures precious treasures it might contain.
What Themistocles did was to persuade the assembly not to use this new treasure to
build a wall, but rather to build ships, specifically triremes.
These are the Greek war ship par excellence.
They're called triremes because there were three banks of rowers, sitting one on top
of another, and this instituted what has come to be called the naval policy.
We talked about the legacy of Marathon and the Hoplite warriors there.
It is Themistocles, really, I think, who can be credited with turning Athens into a
maritime power. This will have enormous social
consequences as well. There exists a remarkable relief that
shows a schematic trireme, you can see the rowers there pulling away at their oars.
And if you want some idea of what this might have looked like in actuality, you
can see this drawing. The tactics were that you would try to
build up speed. And then right here, under the prow, there
is a metal reinforced beak that you would use to punch a hole at the waterline of
the enemy ship. Failing that, you would grapple, and there
was a troop of soldiers, or marines we might call them here, who were ready to
jump over and fight the enemy hand-to-hand.
Hoplite combat, as we have said, was self-financed.
The Hoplite warriors bought their own armor, and if they were particularly
wealthy, outfitted a horse as well. But triremes depended on free labor to
build the ships, maintain the docks, man the ores.
So the poor citizens now had, so to speak, another whole profession opening up to
them, another possible source of income. And one of the things we will see, and we
will talk about it repeatedly over the next several lectures, is this paradox of
an increasingly radical democracy at home coupled with an increasingly aggressive
and militaristic policy abroad. But we have time to get to that.
We'll finish our discussion today by looking at two real, a few real ostracon.
Because in the late 480's, certainly at the instigation of Themistocles, one
Aristides, the son of Lysimachus was ostracized.
He was a traditional politician. He was famously upright.
He was called Aristides the Just. That was his nickname.
There's a funny little anecdote, that an illiterate citizen came up to Aristides
during the ostracization and asked him to write the name Aristides on the pot shard,
and Aristides, as he complied, asked the citizen why, and the citizen said, I'm
just so sick of hearing him called Aristides the just.
It's an apocryphal story, but amusing enough.
But this democratic weapon of ostracism was used and was used quite effectively as
we have seen. It wasn't just Aristides, the attempts to
ostracize Themistocles the son of Neocles as well, didn't work, at least not for a
while. And we will see that Themistocles plays a
central role, as the Athenians and the other Greeks ward off a second Persian
invasion, because in the mid 480's Darius died, and rule passed to his young son
Xerxes, who was determined to complete what his father had begun, and we'll see
what happens then.
