The new constitution of the tribes, as it led to a change in the
annual senate, so it transformed, no less directly, the military
arrangements of the state, both as to soldiers and as to officers.
The citizens called upon to serve in arms were now marshalled
according to tribes,—each tribe having its own taxiarchs as officers
for the hoplites, and its own phylarch at the head of the horsemen.
Moreover, there were now created for the first time ten strategi, or
generals, one from each tribe; and two hipparchs, for the supreme
command of the horsemen. Under the prior Athenian constitution it
appears that the command of the military force had been vested in the
third archon, or polemarch, no strategi then existing; and even after
the latter had been created, under the Kleisthenean constitution,
the polemarch still retained a joint right of command along with
them,—as we are told at the battle of Marathon, where Kallimachus
the polemarch not only enjoyed an equal vote in the council of war
along with the ten strategi, but even occupied the post of honor on
the right wing.[255] The ten generals, annually changed, are thus
(like the ten tribes) a fruit of the Kleisthenean constitution, which
was at the same time powerfully strengthened and protected by such
remodelling of the military force. The functions of the generals
becoming more extensive as the democracy advanced, they seem to
have acquired gradually not merely the direction of military and
naval affairs, but also that of the foreign relations of the city
generally,—while the nine archons, including the polemarch, were by
degrees lowered down from that full executive and judicial competence
which they had once enjoyed, to the simple ministry of police and
preparatory justice. Encroached upon by the strategi on one side,
they were also restricted in efficiency by the rise of the popular
dikasteries or numerous jury-courts, on the other. We may be very
sure that these popular dikasteries had not been permitted to meet
or to act under the despotism of the Peisistratids, and that the
judicial business of the city must then have been conducted partly
by the Senate of Areopagus, partly by the archons; perhaps with a
nominal responsibility of the latter at the end of their year of
office to an acquiescent ekklesia. And if we even assume it to be
true, as some writers contend, that the habit of direct popular
judicature, over and above this annual trial of responsibility, had
been partially introduced by Solon, it must have been discontinued
during the long coercion exercised by the supervening dynasty. But
the outburst of popular spirit, which lent force to Kleisthenês,
doubtless carried the people into direct action as jurors in the
aggregate Heliæa, not less than as voters in the ekklesia,—and the
change was thus begun which contributed to degrade the archons from
their primitive character as judges, into the lower function of
preliminary examiners and presidents of a jury. Such convocation of
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