The choice of the stratêgi remained ever afterwards upon the footing
on which Aristeidês thus placed it. But the lot for the choice of
archon must have been introduced shortly after his proposition of
universal eligibility, and in consequence too of the same tide of
democratical feeling,—introduced as a farther corrective, because the
poor citizen, though he had become eligible, was nevertheless not
elected. And at the same time, I imagine, that elaborate distribution
of the Heliæa, or aggregate body of dikasts, or jurors, into separate
pannels, or dikasteries, for the decision of judicial matters, was
first regularized. It was this change that stole away from the
archons so important a part of their previous jurisdiction: it was
this change that Periklês more fully consummated by insuring pay
to the dikasts. But the present is not the time to enter into the
modifications which Athens underwent during the generation after the
battle of Platæa. They have been here briefly noticed for the purpose
of reasoning back, in the absence of direct evidence, to Athens as
it stood in the generation before that memorable battle, after the
reform of Kleisthenês. His reform, though highly democratical,
stopped short of the mature democracy which prevailed from Periklês
to Demosthenês, in three ways especially, among various others;
and it is therefore sometimes considered by the later writers as
an aristocratical constitution:[267] 1. It still recognized the
archons as judges to a considerable extent, and the third archon, or
polemarch, as joint military commander along with the stratêgi. 2.
It retained them as elected annually by the body of citizens, not as
chosen by lot.[268] 3. It still excluded the fourth class of the
Solonian census from all individual office, the archonship among the
rest. The Solonian law of exclusion, however, though retained in
principle, was mitigated in practice thus far,—that whereas Solon
had rendered none but members of the highest class on the census
(the Pentakosiomedimni) eligible to the archonship, Kleisthenês
opened that dignity to all the first three classes, shutting out
only the fourth. That he did this may be inferred from the fact that
Aristeidês, assuredly not a rich man, became archon.
[267] Plutarch, Kimon, c. 15. τὴν ἐπὶ Κλεισθένους ἐγείρειν
ἀριστοκρατίαν πειρωμένου: compare Plutarch, Aristeidês, c. 2, and
Isokratês, Areopagiticus, Or. vii, p. 143, p. 192, ed. Bek.
[268] Herodotus speaks of Kallimachus the Polemarch, at Marathon,
as ὁ τῷ κυάμῳ λαχὼν Πολέμαρχος (vi, 110).
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