Before we go on to military developments, we should stop for a moment, and talk a bit about domestic politics at Athens. Which, of course, were not idle during all of this time. Miltiades we've spoken about. He was the Athenian commander at Marathon, highly revered, very respected. After his victory there, he undertook a campaign against the island of Paros. Not quite sure why, perhaps because they had Medized, but the expedition was a failure. On his return to Athens, he was prosecuted by one Xanthippus, who was an Alchamianid. Miltiades belonged to another great clan called the Filiads. Xanthippus won on a charge of deceiving the people, and Miltiades was hit with an enormous fine of 50 talons we are told, which is the income for a fairly good sized polis, annual income for a good sized polis. He died before he could pay it, it was eventually paid by his son[FOREIGN], whom we will meet again. The point however, is not that Miltiades had done anything wrong. What we're seeing is the feuding among the elite clans, the descendants of the old Eupatrids, but now conducted within the new democratic system. It is in the aftermath of Marathon then that we have the first ostracism. In 488, Hipparchus, we've seen that name before of the Pysistorate clan was ostracized. Let me remind you, just very quickly, that this occurred once a year. The Assembly was asked if it wanted an ostracism. If it voted in the affirmative, then later on in that year, a vote was taken with names written on pot shards and whoever got a simple majority had to leave Athens for 10 years. While he was gone however, his property was conserved for him. And when he returned, he assumed full civil rights. This was Clysones measure to prevent tyranny, but wound up being used over and over again against some of the leading citizens in the community. So that in 487 for example, Megacles, another name we have learned before, another Alcmaeonid, was ostracized. And 2 years after that, Xanthippus, that same man who had prosecuted Miltiades, was ostracized. 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.
