Cleisthenes
In 510, Spartan troops helped the Athenians overthrow their king, the tyrant Hippias, son of Peisistratos. Cleomenes I, king of Sparta, installed a pro-Spartan oligarchy led by Isagoras. But his rival Cleisthenes, assisted by the support of the middle class and democrats, reversed this. Cleomenes intervened in 508 and 506, but could not stop Cleisthenes, now supported by the Athenians. By his reforms, Cleisthenes endowed the city with isonomic institutions (that is, institutions in which all have the same rights) and established ostracism.
The isonomic and isegoric (iségoria: same legal right) democracy expressed itself first in the deme. Citizenship required enrolling on the citizenship list of a deme, of which there were about 130 in Attica. The 10,000 citizens of the demes exercised their power via the assembly (the ecclesia, in Greek) of which they all were part, headed by a council of 500 citizens chosen at random.
The city's administrative geography was overhauled, the goal being to have mixed political groups, classified by local interests linked to the sea, to the city, or to farming, and to which decisions (such as declarations of war) would be submitted to their geographical position. The territory of the city was divided into 30 trittyes as follows:
- ten trittyes in the coastal Parali
- ten trittyes in the Asty, the urban centre
- ten trittyes in the rural Mésogée.
A tribe was three trittyes, taken at random, one from each of these three. Each tribe therefore always acted in the interests of all three areas.
These reforms eventually allowed the emergence of a wider democracy in the 460s and 450s BC.
Read more about this topic: Greece In 5th Century BC